Although I have said the country looked as if uninhabited, there were numerous villages hidden away in the long grass and brushwood, invisible at a distance, being huts of thatch or mud, and not so high as the grass among which they were placed.  From these villages came most of our servants, and also the middlemen, who acted as brokers between us, the white men, and the negroes who brought ivory and gum and india-rubber from the far interior for sale.  Our trade was principally in ivory, and when an unusually large number of elephants’ tusks arrived upon the Point for sale, it would be crowded with Bushmen, strange and uncouth, and hideously ugly, and armed, and then we would be very busy; for sometimes as many as two hundred tusks would be brought to us at the same time, and each of these had to be bargained for and paid for by exchange of cotton cloths, guns, knives, powder, and a host of small wares.

For some time after my arrival our factory, along with the others on the coast belonging to Messrs. Flint Brothers, was very well supplied by them with goods for the trade; but by degrees their shipments became less frequent, and small when they did come.  In spite of repeated letters we could gain no reason from the firm for this fact, nor could the other factories, and gradually we found ourselves with an empty storehouse, and nearly all our goods gone.  Then followed a weary interval, during which we had nothing whatever to do, and day succeeded day through the long hot season.  It was now that I began to feel that Jackson had become of late more silent and reserved with me than ever he had been.  I noticed, too, that he had contracted a habit of wandering out to the extreme end of the Point, where he would sit for hours gazing upon the ocean before him.  In addition to this, he grew morose and uncertain in his temper toward the natives, and sometimes he would fall asleep in the evenings on a sofa, and talk to himself at such a rate while asleep that I would grow frightened and wake him, when he would stare about him for a little until he gathered consciousness, and then he would stagger off to bed to fall asleep again almost immediately.  Also, his hands trembled much, and he began to lose flesh.  All this troubled me, for his own sake as well as my own, and I resolved to ask him to see the doctor of the next mail-steamer that came.  With this idea I went one day to the end of the Point, and found him in his usual attitude, seated on the long grass, looking seaward.  He did not hear me approach, and when I spoke he started to his feet, and demanded fiercely why I disturbed him.  I replied, as mildly as I could, for I was rather afraid of the glittering look that was in his eyes, that I wished to ask him if he did not feel ill.

He regarded me with a steady but softened glance for a little, and then said: 

“My lad, I thank you for your trouble; but I want no doctor.  Do you think I’m looking ill?”