In company with a branch
establishment of the Mission, he was subsequently located at Khartoum,
and from thence was sent up the White Nile to a Mission-station in the
Shillook country. The climate of the White Nile destroyed thirteen
missionaries in the short space of six months, and the boy Saat returned
with the remnant of the party to Khartoum, and was re-admitted into the
Mission. The establishment was at that time swarming with little black
boys from the various White Nile tribes, who repaid the kindness of the
missionaries by stealing everything they could lay their hands upon. At
length the utter worthlessness of the boys, their moral obtuseness, and
the apparent impossibility of improving them, determined the chief of
the Mission to purge his establishment from such imps, and they were
accordingly turned out. Poor little Saat, the one grain of gold amidst
the mire, shared the same fate.
It was about a week before our departure from Khartoum that Mrs. Baker
and I were at tea in the middle of the court-yard, when a miserable boy
about twelve years old came uninvited to her side, and knelt down in the
dust at her feet. There was something so irresistibly supplicating in
the attitude of the child, that the first impulse was to give him
something from the table. This was declined, and he merely begged to be
allowed to live with us, and to be our boy.
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