But the articles I found in the factories in Libreville were what, in the Congo, are called “white man’s goods” and were of excellent quality and in great variety.  There were even French novels and cigars.  Some of the latter, called the Young American on account of the name and the flag on the lid, tempted me, until I saw they were manufactured by Dusseldorffer and Vanderswassen, and one suspected Rotterdam.

In Ives’s factory I saw for the first time a “trade” rifle, or Tower musket.  In the vernacular of the Coast, they are “gas-pipe” guns.  They are put together in England, and to a white man are a most terrifying weapon.  The original Tower muskets, such as, in the days of ’76, were hung over the fireplace of the forefathers of the Sons of the Revolution, were manufactured in England, and stamped with the word “Tower,” and for the reigning king G.R.  I suppose at that date at the Tower of London there was an arsenal; but I am ready to be corrected.  To-day the guns are manufactured at Birmingham, but they still have the flint lock, and still are stamped with the word “Tower” and the royal crown over the letters G.R., and with the arrow which is supposed to mark the property of the government.  The barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore is that of an artesian well.  The native fills four inches of this cavity with powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire, leaden slugs, and the legs and broken parts of iron pots.  An officer of the W.A.F.F.’s, in a fight in the bush in South Nigeria, had one of these things fired at him from a distance of fifteen feet.  He told me all that saved him was that when the native pulled the trigger the recoil of the gun “kicked” the muzzle two feet in the air and the native ten feet into the bush.  I bought a Tower rifle at the trade price, a pound, and brought it home.  But although my friends have offered to back either end of the gun as being the more destructive, we have found no one with a sufficient sporting spirit to determine the point.

Libreville is a very pretty town, but when it was laid out the surveyors just missed placing the Equator in its main street.  It is easy to understand why with such a live wire in the vicinity Libreville is warm.  From the same cause it also is rich in flowers, vines, and trees growing in generous, undisciplined abundance, making of Libreville one vast botanical garden, and burying the town and its bungalows under screens of green and branches of scarlet and purple flowers.  Close to the surf runs an avenue bordered by giant cocoanut palms and, after the sun is down, this is the fashionable promenade.  Here every evening may be seen in their freshest linen the six married white men of Libreville, and, in the latest Paris frocks, the six married ladies, while from the verandas of the factories that line the sea front and from under the paper lanterns of the Cafe Guion the clerks and traders sip their absinthe and play dominoes, and cast envious glances at the six fortunate fellow exiles.