This is not due to me. Lieutenant Stairs was pierced with a poisoned arrow like others, but others died and he lives. The poisoned tip came out from under his heart eighteen months after he was pierced. Jephson was four months a prisoner, with guards with loaded rifles around him. That they did not murder him is not due to me.
These officers have had to wade through as many as seventeen streams and broad expanses of mud and swamp in a day. They have endured a sun that scorched whatever it touched. A multitude of impediments have ruffled their tempers and harassed their hours.
They have been maddened with the agonies of fierce fevers. They have lived for months in an atmosphere that medical authority declared to be deadly. They have faced dangers every day, and their diet has been all through what legal serfs would have declared to be infamous and abominable; and yet they live. This is not due to me any more than the courage with which they have borne all that was imposed upon them by their surroundings or the cheery energy which they bestowed on their work or the hopeful voices which rang in the ears of a deafening multitude of blacks and urged the poor souls on to their goal.
The vulgar will call it luck; unbelievers will call it chance; but deep down in each heart remains the feeling—that of verity. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in common philosophy.
I must be brief. Numbers of scenes crowd the memory. Could one but sum them into a picture it would have great interest. The uncomplaining heroism of our dark followers, the brave manhood latent in such uncouth disguise, the tenderness we have seen issuing from nameless entities, the great love animating the ignoble, the sacrifice made by the unfortunate for one more unfortunate, the reverence we have noted in barbarians, who, even as ourselves, were inspired with nobleness and incentives to duty—of all these we could speak if we would, but I leave that to the “Herald” correspondent, who, if he has eyes to see, will see much for himself, and who with his gifts of composition may present a very taking outline of what has been done and is now near ending, thanks be to God forever and ever.
Yours faithfully,
HENRY M. STANLEY.
