Jaffery’s letters are an embarrassment of riches.  If I printed them in full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of the African continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round by the Cape of Good Hope to Port Said.  But Jaffery, in his lavish way, duplicated these travel-pictures in articles to The Daily Gazette, which, supplemented by memory, he has already published in book form for all the world to read.  Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter entirely irrelevant to this chronicle.  You must just imagine the rusty Vesta wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa, disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken port, and making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a European market.  If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all about it; but you see, I remained in England.  And if I subjected Jaffery’s correspondence to microscopic examination, and read up blue books on the exports and imports of all the places on the South African coast line, and told you exactly what was taken out of the S.S.  Vesta and what was put into her, I cannot conceive your being in the slightest degree interested.  To do so, would bore me to death.  To me, cargo is just cargo.  The transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a matter of awful noise and perspiring confusion.  I have travelled, in so-called comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa.  I know all about it.  Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a mile of the shore.  On one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed lighters manned by glistening and excited negroes.  On board is a donkey-engine working a derrick with a Tophetical clatter.  Vast bales and packing cases are lifted from the holds.  A dingily white-suited officer stands by with greasy invoice sheets, while another at the yawning abyss whence the cargo emerges makes the tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations.  And the merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter, by black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of unmeaning ferocity.  That is all that unloading cargo means to me; and I cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or daughters of men who are not intimately concerned in a particular trade. . . .  You must imagine, I say, the S.S.  Vesta repeating this monotonous performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the little, black-bearded skipper, all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English, fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the tour du proprietaire, among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels