This work can only be seen in its true perspective when the character of the country is borne in mind.  For nearly all of its 150 miles the road from Cape Coast to Kumassi leads through heavy primeval forest.  “The thick foliage of the trees, interlaced high overhead, causes a deep, dank gloom, through which the sun seldom penetrates.  The path winds among the tree stems and bush, now through mud and morass, now over steep ascent or deep ravine.”  And, in addition to the difficulties of locomotion, there was the haunting menace of the heavy dews and mists which come at night laden with the poison of malaria.

But all these difficulties were met with cheerful courage, and though Captain Graham and two other officers subsequently attached to the covering force were incapacitated by fever, the Native Levy fought its way to Kumassi, and won the admiration of all military authorities.  It was at Kumassi on 17th January, and though no actual fighting had taken place, the march may be reckoned an achievement of which all Englishmen can be proud.

One incident of the march will have a romantic attraction for those who have sons and brothers doing the Empire’s work in distant lands.  As the Native Levy with its two white officers journeyed through the bush they came now and then upon bridges over streams and causeways over swamps, all in course of construction at the hands of natives under the direction of a few ever-travelling, hard-worked white superintendents.  “Here we meet one gaunt and yellow.  Surely we have seen that eye and brow before, although the beard and solar topee do much to disguise the man.  His necktie of faded ‘Old Carthusian’ colours makes suspicion a certainty, and once again old school-fellows are flung together for an hour to talk in an African swamp of old times in English playing-fields.”  For an hour in an African swamp! and then on again through the never-ending dark green aisles towards the savages smitten with the blood-lust in “the death-place.”

The Ashantis did not show fight, and King Prempeh, sucking a huge nut, surrounded by court-criers and fly-catchers, with three dwarfs dancing in front of his throne, consented humbly and meekly to receive the soldiers of the Queen.  After Sir Francis Scott had presented Prempeh with his ultimatum the meeting broke up for the night, but the “Wolf that never Sleeps” was on the look-out with his Native Levy for a possible surprise, or for His Majesty’s escape.  You can imagine how “Sherlock Holmes,” as Burnham the American scout calls our hero, enjoyed that work.  In the quiet night, under the white stars, a council was being held in the savage king’s palace, and B.-P. “shadowed” that regal hut with eyes and ears alive.  At three o’clock in the morning a white light streamed out of the palace doorway, and through the clinging mist went a string of white-robed figures, one of them the queen-mother.  This little company passed within twenty yards of B.-P., and it was followed stealthily by him until