March 28th fell on a Sunday, and luckily for the travellers, the inhabitants of the place considered it as a holiday, and their singing, dancing, and savage jollity possessed greater charms for them than an empty rum cask, though backed by two white faces.  With a trifling exception or so, they were in consequence unmolested by their visitors of the everlasting grin and unwearied tongue during the day.  This happy circumstance afforded them an opportunity, and ample leisure for spending the Sabbath in a manner most agreeable to their feelings; by devoting the greater part of it to the impressive duties of their divine religion, in humbling themselves before the mercy seat of the great Author of their being, and imploring him to be their refuge and guardian, to shield them from every danger, and to render their undertakings hopeful and prosperous.

As yet no crime of any peculiar atrocity had been committed, to impress the travellers with an unfavourable opinion of the moral character of the people amongst whom they were then residing, but on this evening of the Sabbath, a Fantee was robbed of his effects, and stabbed by an assassin below the ribs, so that his life was despaired of.  The most unlucky part, however, of this tragical affair to Richard Lander, was, that the natives, from some cause, which he could not divine, had imbibed the conceit that he was skilled in surgery.  In vain, he protested that he knew nothing of the anatomy of the human frame—­there were many present, who knew far better than he did himself, and therefore, nolens volens, he was obliged to visit the patient.  It was certainly the first time that Richard Lander had been called in to exercise his surgical skill, and it must be admitted that in one sense, he was well adapted for the character of a bone-setter, or other offices for which the gentlemen of the lancet are notorious.  This trait in his character consisted in a gravity of countenance well befitting the individual, who presents himself to his anxious patient, to pronounce the great question of life and death, and the greater the ignorance of the individual, the deeper and more solemn is the countenance, which he assumes.  If Richard Lander had been in the least inclined to a risible disposition, perhaps no occasion was more likely to call it into action, than when he saw himself followed by two or three hundred savages, under an imputation of possessing the power of curing an individual, who had been stabbed nearly to the heart, when at the same time, he knew as much of the art of stopping an haemorrhage, as he did of the art of delivering one of the queens of Badagry of an heir to “the golden stool.”  Fortunately, however, for the new debutant in the medical profession, the victim of the assassin had died a few minutes before the English doctor arrived, and right glad he was, for had he found his patient alive, and he had afterwards died, no doubt whatever rested on his mind, that his death would be attributed to the want of skill on