Old John nodded, blinking his mischievous eyes.  He had more sympathy than Charlie with the foolishness of old romance.  It was true enough, he said, and added that he knew the man I wanted, a half-crazy old negro back there in Grant’s Town—­the negro quarter spreading out into the brush behind the ridge on which the town of Nassau proper is built.

“He calls himself a ‘king,’” he added, “and the natives do, I believe, regard him as the head of a certain tribe.  Another tribe has its ‘queen’ whom they take much more seriously.  You must not forget that it is not so long ago since they all came from Africa, and the oldest negroes still speak their strange African languages, and keep up their old beliefs and practices.  ‘Obeah,’ of course, is still actively practised.

“Why,” he resumed presently, “I may even be said to practise it myself; for I protect that part of my grounds here that abuts on Grant’s Town by hanging up things in bottles along the fences, which frighten away at least a percentage of would-be trespassers.  You should go and see the old man, if only for fun.  The lads call him ’Old King Coffee’—­a memory I suppose of the Ashantee War.  Any one will tell you where he lives.  He is something of a witch-doctor as well as ‘king,’ and manages to make a little out of charms, philtres and such like, I’m told—­enough to keep him in rum anyway.  He has a name too as a preacher—­among the Holy Jumpers!—­but he’s getting too old to do much preaching nowadays.  He may be a little off his head, but I think he’s more of a shrewd old fraud.  Go and see him for fun anyway.”

So, next morning, I went.

I had hardly been prepared for the plunge into “Darkest Africa” which I found myself taking, as, leaving Government House behind, perched on the crest of its white ridge, I walked a few yards inland and entered a region which, for all its green palms, made a similar sudden impression of pervading blackness on the mind which one gets on suddenly entering a coal-mining district, after travelling through fields and meadows.

There were far more blacks than whites down on Bay Street, but here there were nothing but blacks on every side.  The wood of the cabins—­most of them neat enough and pleasantly situated in their little gardens of bananas and cocoa-nut palms—­was black, as with age or coal dust; and the very foliage, in its suggestion of savage scenes in one’s old picture-books, suggested “natives.”  The innumerable smart little pigs that seemed free of the place were black.  The innumerable goats, too, were black.  And everywhere, mixed in with the pigs and the goats, were the blackest of picaninnies.  Everywhere black faces peered from black squares of windows, most of them cheery and round and prosperous looking, but here and there a tragically old crone with witch-like white hair.