of the rocks, which were reported to intercept the stream at a little distance from the place whereon they stood, and to be very dangerous for canoes that were heavily laden.  The venerable governor of Patashie, to whom they were under so many obligations, preceded them on the footpath, walking with a staff, and they reached the appointed place of embarkation exactly at the same moment as the canoes.  After thanking all the friends that had accompanied them, they jumped on board, and pushed off from the shore, cheered by the natives that were present.

The current bore them rapidly along, and having passed down in front of one or two towns on the banks of the river, they came in sight of Lever, which was the place of their destination, it being about twenty miles from Patashie.

Their surprise was, however, great indeed, when instead of the proper person whom they expected would have received them, they were welcomed on shore by a man called Ducoo, who represented himself as the agent and confidential friend of the prince of Rabba, but their surprise was not a little increased on learning that a party of forty or fifty armed Fellata soldiers were also in the town.  Ducoo treated them with the courtly politeness of a Frenchman, and was equally lavish in his compliments and offers of service; he walked with them to the chief of the town, to whom he took the liberty of introducing them, almost before he knew himself who or what they were; went himself and procured excellent lodgings for them, returned and sat down in their company to tell them some droll stories, and impart to them in confidence some very disagreeable news; then hastily arose, went out, and came back again with a sheep and other provisions, which he had obtained by compulsion from the chief, and finally remained with them till long after the moon had risen, when he left them to their repose.

The Landers now began to discover that they had been egregiously imposed upon, for in the first place they found, after all, that Lever did not belong to the king of Wowow, though it stands on his dominions, nor had that monarch a single subject here, or a single canoe, so that they were as far as ever they were from getting one, and with the loss of their horses to boot.  They now found to their cost that they had been cajoled and out-manoeuvred by those fellows of Boossa and its adjoining state, whom they falsely conceived to be their dearest and best black friends.  They had played with them as if they were great dolls; they had been driven about like shuttlecocks; they had been to them first a gazing stock, and afterwards were their laughing stock, and, perhaps, not unlikely their mockery; they had been their admiration, their buffoons, their wonder and their scorn, a by-word and a jest.  Else why this double dealing, this deceit, this chicanery, these hollow professions?  “Why,” as Richard Lander says, “did they entrap us in this manner?  Why have they led us about as though we had been blind, only to place us in the very lap of what they imagine to be danger?  For can it be possible that the monarchs of Wowow and Boossa were ignorant of the state of things here, which is in their own immediate neighbourhood, and which have continued the same essentially for these three years?  Surely,” concludes Lander, “they have knowingly deceived us.”