side.

"And you," he mocked, "think you can reform that man, and that hell
above ground called the Congo, with an article in Lowell's Weekly?"

Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully.

"That's what I'm here for!" he said.

By the time Everett reached the mouth of the Congo, he had learned that
in everything he must depend upon himself; that he would be accepted
only as the kind of man that, at the moment, he showed himself to be.
This attitude of independence was not chosen, but forced on him by the
men with whom he came in contact. Associations and traditions, that in
every part of the United States had served as letters of introduction,
and enabled strangers to identify and label him, were to the white men
on the steamer and at the ports of call without meaning or value. That
he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who had not heard
even of Boston. That he was the correspondent of Lowell's Weekly meant
less to those who did not know that Lowell's Weekly existed. And when,
in confusion, he proffered his letter of credit, the very fact that it
called for a thousand pounds was, in the eyes of a "Palm Oil Ruffian,"
sufficient evidence that it had been forged or stolen. He soon saw that
solely as a white man was he accepted and made welcome. That he was
respectable, few believed, and no one cared. To be taken at his face
value, to be refused at the start the benefit of the doubt, was a novel
sensation; and yet not unpleasant. It was a relief not to be accepted
only as Everett the Muckraker, as a professional reformer, as one holier
than others. It afforded his soul the same relaxation that his body
received when, in his shirt-sleeves in the sweltering smoking-room, he