Some of my guests reached over my shoulder, punched the horn button, and shouted in delight at the sound. They cranked the windows up and down, grimaced into the rear-vision mirror, and giggled at the results.

   I halted the car, climbed out, and stood laughing helplessly as the others disembarked. The scene reminded me of the Keystone Cops pouring interminably out of their Model-T patrol wagon in an old Mack Sennett movie.

   My passengers were Pygmies, the tiny reddish-chocolate people who live deep in the Ituri rain forest of the Belgian Congo. They were denizens of the villages adjoining Camp Putnam beside the Epulu River, a minor tributary of Africa's second longest stream, the Congo.

   I was home again. Here I had lived for eight wonderful years with my late husband, Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam, a Harvard-trained anthropologist. After Patrick's death in December, 1953, I had spent three years in my native New York City. And now I was back among my best friends.

   Patrick Putnam first came to the Congo in 1928. He fell in love with the Epulu region, saw the Pygmies as a challenging subject for his research, and resolved to spend the rest of his life there. By taking a course prescribed by the Belgian Government, he became an agent sanitaire, or public health officer. Patrick was also an expert woodsman; during World War II the Belgians asked him to investigate the Congo's important wild rubber resources.

   In addition to these attainments, Patrick had an imposing appearance, a gift for leadership, and a genuine concern for the Little People's welfare. All combined to give him 2 godlike stature among the Pygmies. A wild shock of hair and a luxuriant beard of flaming red made him seem even taller than his six feet, one inch. Whenever I saw my husband surrounded by miniature Congoese, whose height varies between four and five feet, I always thought of Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

   Not long after Patrick and I first met on Martha's Vineyard during one of his trips home, I knew the Congo could mean as much to me as it meant to him. I was a painter, and the thought of having an unspoiled landscape and primitive Pygmies as subjects excited me.

   Some of my friends thought I was taking leave of my senses to go off to Africa as the bride of this lean giant. Sometimes, privately, I thought they might be right…"