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 amid 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.