At half-past six another bell goes—how the converts love bell-ringing!—and they hurry out to the Chapel where the other members of the Mission staff and a posse of native boys and girls meet them. More prayers, a psalm, and a hymn sung lustily but disharmoniously.
Then the whites adjourn to the house or large hut where the meals of the community are served. The dining-table is of rough-hewn planks of native timber, and on either side of it there are similarly rough forms to sit on, with a native stool at either end of the table. The breakfast consists of porridge and milk, the porridge being made of native cereals and often a little bitter. There is coarse brown bread with a sour taste as it is made with fermented palm wine. There are butter from a tin—rather rancid—potted salmon, and bantams' eggs from the native poultry, so under-boiled that they run out over the plate when opened.
John asks a blessing on the meal. They then proceed to eat it, while the males drink with some noisiness the tea that Ann pours out. "You don't seem to have much appetite this morning, Lucy," says Ann of malice prepense: "Porridge burnt again? What is it?"
"Thank you. There is nothing wrong with the porridge, so far as I know. I am simply not hungry."
"Ah! Been at those bananas again. They're very sustaining. But you'll never be well if you eat between meals."
"I eat at meals and between 'em," says Brother Anderson, "and I'm glad to say loss of appetite don't never trouble me. This is a rare climate to make and keep you hungry."
Anderson is voracious and somewhat lacking in table manners, defects atoned for by his being an unremitting worker and well contented with his lot—Eupeptic, as we learnt to say at a later date. But he keeps his spoon in his cup and holds it steady with a black-rimmed thumb when he drinks. He also helps himself to butter with his own knife, talks with his mouth full, and never masticates behind closed lips but displays the process without self-consciousness. Lucy, who is squeamish about such things, glances at him occasionally with scarcely concealed disgust. Brother Bayley eats more sparingly and divides his attention between his food and a printed vocabulary of Kisagara. He has a strong predilection for reading at meals, which ever and again comes under the lash of Ann's tongue. She does not consider it good manners.
John himself makes a hearty breakfast, but glances occasionally at Lucy's silent abstemiousness. At last Ann, the housekeeper, rises after Brothers Bayley and Anderson have left the table for their work, and says to Lucy: "Don't sit too long over your food because I want Priscilla and Florence to clear away, wash up and then come to me...."
She goes out.
"Not well, Lucy, this morning?" says John, who is beginning to despair about her fitting in to mission life. The conviction which he often repels takes him now with an ache. He loves the work himself, not only the converting these savages to a better mode of life, but the unrealized colonization about the whole business, the planting of fruit trees, the increase of flocks and herds, the freedom from civilization's shackles and class distinctions....