wild beast’s track led us to an immense glade, like a small plain, hemmed in by the woods, where we saw herds of antelope quietly feeding.  We started in pursuit of them, but like the ducks on the ponds, the creatures seemed to have a very correct appreciation of the distance our guns would carry and the impotent fire we poured on them disturbed them not.  Not a single beast even left the plain to take shelter in the woods, where we could hear the greater wild ones howling.  Ah! if we had possessed long-range weapons, what a shoot we should have had, and what a paradise of sport that virgin country was!  But one victim only fell to our rifles, a big monkey, which one of our sailors killed, and which he and his comrades eat.  It was, so it would appear, a dish to lick your lips over!

For want of game we brought something else back with us from this expedition up the Gambia and Cazamanze rivers—­fever.  Not a soul escaped it, and in spite of the care of the surgeon-major of the Belle-Poule, who was particularly skilful in treating the malady, we took a long time to get over it.  I went back to Goree, where I was to see another sad sight.  One of our gunboats had come in from a river-station with only four healthy men out of seventy-five.  Typhus fever was decimating the crew.  I had to present the Cross of the Legion of Honour to the lieutenant in command, M. de Langle, who had behaved like a hero.  I went alongside his ship to see him in the lonely creek to which the infected vessel had been relegated.  A crowd of spectral figures crept to the ports to look at me.  It was a pitiful scene.

I had by this time gone the round of nearly all our possessions along the West Coast of Africa, and the impression I was carrying away was far from being a good one.  On this coast, as elsewhere, France originally outstripped all other nations, and the first European expeditions to the Black Continent were sent out from Dieppe during the fourteenth century.  The principal merchandise they brought back consisted of ivory, and the branch of industry occupied by working this substance still exists in that town at the present day.  Up to the eighteenth century all the important factories on the coast were in our hands.  After that date, just as in India and America, where also we had been the earliest colonists, everything began to go to ruin, and our possessions dwindled to the unimportant posts I had just been to see.  Since my visit an effort has been made to recommence some extension of our factories and trade in the locality.  The question is whether it will be successful, and, above all, whether, amidst the vicissitudes of our politics and the constant state of provisional arrangement in which we live, we possess the coherence and connectedness of design and system necessary to that success.  I pray it may be so!  But there are two insurmountable obstacles which will always prove stumbling-blocks to us—­the unhealthy climate, deathly indeed to white men, and the black population, a childish race, who may be disciplined into being good soldiers, but who will never work except when made to by force, and that brute force.