Mou-Setsé: A Negro Hero; The Orphans' Pilgimage: A Story of Trust in God — Reading Notes

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In Category - Fairy Moral Tales

Authors: Meade, L. T., 1854-1914 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2013 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Orphans -- Juvenile fiction; Faith -- Juvenile fiction; African Americans -- Juvenile fiction; Slave trade -- Africa -- Juvenile fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 17,163

Reading time 75 min

Text sections 2

The catalog record for Mou-Setsé: A Negro Hero; The Orphans' Pilgimage: A Story of Trust in God — Reading Notes provides practical reading context through 17,163 words, 1 hr 15 min estimated reading time, and 2 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 21.7 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Orphans -- Juvenile fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #43136

Two stories by L.T. Meade: one follows Mou-Setsé, born in the African town of Eyeo with its own customs and religion; the other depicts orphaned siblings who build a cart and flee an oppressive uncle, trusting in divine guidance.

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Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
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Edition quality

File: pg43136

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Nor was the town a poor one. Perhaps I had better describe it a little, and also describe some of the strange actions of its inhabitants, before I really tell Mou-Setse's story.

Though most of the houses were built of clay, the town of Eyeo was considered very beautiful. It lay in the midst of a fertile and lovely country called Yarriba. The town measured fifteen miles round, and a great deal of the ground was laid out in fields and gardens, so that, notwithstanding what we should call its want of civilisation, it looked very unlike many of the smoky, dirty towns at home, and very much pleasanter to live in.

There were walls round the town twenty feet high, built also of clay; and outside the walls there was a deep ditch. This ditch and this high wall were both necessary to protect the town from its enemies. Of course, like all African towns, it had a great many enemies, but it was supposed to be very well protected. The King of Yarriba lived in Eyeo. He had several wives, and his huts covered a whole square mile of the town. He was an idolater, and he had a council of some of the chief men to help him to rule. The king and his people had a very strange religion; each one of them had a god in his own house, and there were also two chief idols, one called Korowah and the other Terbertaru. One of these gods was for the men, and the other for the women. The women were not allowed to look at the men's god; and when the chief priest offered sacrifice to this god they dared not even glance at him. They might offer to their own god fowls, pigeons, and sometimes bullocks.

These curious idolaters had also a very strange way of burying their dead. All the dead man's riches, instead of going to his children, were buried with him. If he happened to have been a very rich man, his dead body was carried in procession round the town to the burying-place, _which was in the floor of his own room_. After he was buried there with all his riches, his family went on living in the house and daily trampled on his grave without the least concern.

In this town, with its strange religion and its many odd customs, was born the little black baby who is to be the hero of this story. He was called Mou-Setse, and, though he had black skin and rather round and beady eyes, and though certainly his thick, curling hair was also very woolly, yet in his own way he was as fine a little baby as any fair English child; and, as I have said before, his mother was just as proud of him. Mou-Setse had three brothers and one sister older than himself, so he had plenty of playfellows, and was a great pet, being the youngest of the family.

The pretty little fellow used to sit on his mother's lap in the doorway of the mud hut, and play with some very precious glass beads which were hung round her neck. As he grew older he mounted on his elder brother's shoulders, and merrily would he and they laugh as they trotted up and down together. And as he grew still older, and ceased to be a baby, and was able to use his fat, strong legs, he and his brothers and sister went often outside the city walls, and walked through the maize fields beyond and over the plain till they came to the foot of the hills. Then, high up among the rocks, they would wander about in the shade and gather oranges and tamarinds and figs.

No English boys could have been happier than these little Africans on such occasions. Neither Mou-Setse nor his brothers thought of any dark days that might come, and were, alas! only too near.

STORY ONE, CHAPTER TWO.

DARK DAYS IN THE TOWN.

I have said that sad days were not very far from poor little Mou-Setse. They came when he was still only a little boy not more than eight years old.

The people of Eyeo had need of their high wall and their strong fortifications, for they were surrounded by enemies.

Continue Reading →

This volume pairs two stories that share little beyond their author and a concern with faith, yet each builds its world from specific, localized details. The first, Mou-Setsé: A Negro Hero, opens not with action but with a careful description of the African town of Eyeo: its clay huts, twenty-foot walls, and the king’s compound covering a square mile. The narrator pauses to note that the inhabitants worship two chief idols, Korowah and Terbertaru, and bury their dead with all their riches under the floor of the family home. These details are presented as ethnographic fact, not exotic backdrop, and they establish a setting that operates by its own logic before the hero’s story begins.

Two Openings, Two Worlds

The first story begins with a universal claim—“his story began like any one else’s—he came into the world”—then immediately qualifies it: Mou-Setsé is an African boy who “knew nothing of what we English people call civilisation.” The narrator addresses readers directly, comparing the pride of Mou-Setsé’s mother to that of “any English mother,” a rhetorical move that both bridges and marks distance. The second story, The Orphans’ Pilgrimage, starts in medias res with the children’s plan to escape. Its opening is domestic and urgent: the boys pray for guidance, then build a cart from scrap wood. Where the first story lingers on place, the second focuses on process—the making of the cart, the hiding of it, the whispered prayers. The contrast suggests two different modes of adventure: one anchored in cultural description, the other in practical problem-solving.

Faith as a Plot Mechanism

Both stories treat religious faith as a source of direction and courage, but they dramatize it differently. In Mou-Setsé, the town’s idolatry is described in neutral, almost anthropological terms: the women have their own god, Terbertaru, and may not look at the men’s god. The narrative does not condemn these practices directly, though the framing implies a Christian perspective. In The Orphans’ Pilgrimage, faith is explicit and personal. Toni tells Hans that God will show them the way, just as He guides birds to Africa. The children pray before their escape, asking for an angel to keep their uncle asleep. The story presents their trust as both sincere and effective—the plan succeeds, at least in the excerpt. The catalog subject “Faith -- Juvenile fiction” fits the second story more precisely than the first, where faith is a cultural feature rather than a driving force.

Material Culture and Agency

The excerpts highlight how objects carry meaning. In Mou-Setsé, the clay huts and the king’s compound are signs of a civilization that the narrator insists is not poor, just different. The burial custom—burying riches under the floor—turns the home into a grave, a detail that unsettles any simple notion of domesticity. In The Orphans’ Pilgrimage, the children’s cart is built from a cast-off measuring rule and a box cover; their agency is expressed through making. They also take a “precious picture” and their father’s Bible when they flee. These items are not just props but carriers of memory and identity. The stories thus use material details—a clay wall, a wooden cart, a Bible—to ground their characters’ actions in a tangible world, even as those actions are guided by faith.

Readers approaching this volume should be prepared for two distinct narrative modes. The first story offers a slow, descriptive buildup that may feel more like a travelogue than an adventure; the second moves quickly into action and dialogue. Neither excerpt reveals how the stories conclude, so the relationship between the catalog subjects and the actual plot remains partly open. Pay attention to how the narrator addresses the reader—directly in the first story, more invisibly in the second—and to the way each story uses material objects to define its characters’ world.

There’s something tender in watching Mou-Setsé and the orphans trust what they cannot yet see. It reminds me of an older, quieter kind of hope—the sort I felt reading about the inventive boys and their electric cell. The Golden Boys and Their New Electric Cell — Context and Discussion carried that same gentle faith in resourcefulness. I miss the patience those stories taught me.