Landing at the factory of Sr.  Fernandez, we were received by his agent, Sr.  Silva, in a little bungalow of bamboo and matting, paved with tamped earth and old white ostreoid shells, a kind of Mya, relished by the natives but not eaten by Europeans.  To these, doubtless, Mr. W. Winwood Reacle refers ("Savage Africa,” chap, xxxvii.), “The traders say that in Congo there are great heaps of oyster-shells, but no oysters.  These shells the negroes also burn for lime.”  I did not hear of any of these “ostreiras,” which, if they exist, must reflect the Sambaquis of the opposite Brazilian shore.  The house was guarded by three wooden figures, “clouterly carved,” and powdered with ochre or red wood; two of them, representing warriors in studded coatings of spike nails, with a looking-glass fixed in the stomach, raised their hands as if to stab each other.  These figures are sometimes found large as life:  according to the agents, the spikes are driven in before the wars begin, and every one promises the hoped-for death of an enemy.  Behind them the house was guarded by a sentinel with drawn sword.  The unfortunate tenant, who looked a martyr to ague, sat “in palaver” with a petty island “king,” and at times the tap of a war-drum roused my experienced ear.  The monarch, habited in a shabby cloth coat, occupied a settee, with a “minister” on either side; he was a fat senior of light complexion, with a vicious expression upon features, which were not those of the “tobacconist nigger,” nor had he the effeminate aspect of the Congoese.

I looked curiously at these specimens of the Musulungu or Musurungu, a wilder race than that of Shark Point:  the English, of course, call them Missolonghi, because Lord Byron died there.  Here the people say “le” for “re,” and “rua” for “lua,” confounding both liquids, which may also be found in the Kibundo tongue.  In Loango, according to the Abbe Proyart, the national organ does not admit the roughness of the r, which is changed to l.  Monteiro and Gamitto assert (xxii.) that the “Cazembes or Lundas do not pronounce the letter r, in whose place they use l.”  The “Ibos” of the lower Congo, dwelling on the southern shore between the mouth and the Porto da Lenha, above which they are harmless, these men have ever been dangerous to strangers, and the effect of the slave-trade has been to make them more formidable.  Lieutenant Boteler (1835) was attacked by twenty-eight canoes, carrying some 140 men, who came on boldly, “ducking” at the flash, and who were driven off only by a volley of musketry and a charge of grape.  In 1860 a whaler and crew were attacked by their war-canoes sallying out from behind Scotchman’s Head.  These craft are of two kinds, one shaped like a horse-trough, the other with a lean and snaky head.  The “Wrangler” lost two of her men near Zunga chya Kampenzi, and the “Griffon” escaped by firing an Armstrong conical shell.  They have frequently surprised and kept for ransom the white agents, whom “o