sneaking into the huts, and, however often beaten off, they return to the charge like sitting hens.  The people prize these wretched tikes, because they are ever ready to worry a stranger, and are useful in driving game from the bush.  Yet they barbarously ill-treat them.  The hungry cats are as poor a breed as the pure English, and, though no one feeds them, these domesticated tigerkins swarm.  The only happy pets are the parrots.  Every village swarms with hogs, the filthy wealth of the old Saxon proprietor, and their habits are disgusting as their forms are obscene.  Every Anglo-Indian will understand what I mean.

My memory of “Congo chop” is all in its favour:  I can recommend it even to “Fin Bee.”  The people of S’a Leone declare that your life is safe when you can enjoy native food.  Perhaps this means that, during the time required to train the palate, strangers will have escaped their “seasoning” fevers and chills.  But foreigners will certainly fare better and, caeteris paribus, outlive their brother whites, when they can substitute African stews for the roast and boiled goat and cow, likest to donkey-meat, for the waxy and insipid potato and for heavy pudding and tart, with which their jaded stomach is laden, as if it had the digestion of north latitude 50deg..  It is popularly believed that the Germans, who come from the land of greatest extremes, live longer at the White Man’s Grave than the English, whereas the Spaniards are the most short-lived, one consul per annum being the normal rate.  Perhaps the greater “adaptability” of the Teuton explains the cause.

The evening began with a game of ball in the large open space amongst the houses forming the village square.  The implement was a roll of palm-coir tightly bound with the central fibre of the plantain-leaf.  The players, two parties of some twenty slaves, of all ages and sizes, mingled, each side striving to catch the ball, and with many feints and antics to pass it on to a friend.  When it fell out of bounds, the juniors ran to pick it up with frantic screams.  It was interesting, as showing the difference between the highlander and the lowlander; one might pass years on the Congo plains without seeing so much voluntary exertion:  yet a similar game of ball is described by the Rev. Mr. Waddell ("Twenty-nine years in the West Indies and Central Africa,” chap. xvii.  London, Nelsons, 1863).  The evening ended, as it often does before a march, when rest is required, with extra hard work, a drinking bout deep as the Rhineland baron’s in the good old time, and a dance in which both sexes joined.  As there were neither torches nor moon, I did not attend; the singing, the shouting, and the drumming, which lasted till midnight, spoke well for the agility and endurance of the fair montagnardes.