their sense by starting on Sundays, when the squadron kept a careless look-out; but their inevitable danger was the general “drunk” of the officers and crew to celebrate the event, and this libation often caused delays which led to seizure.  It was an admirable site, a bit of golden sand fronting the cleared bush, commanding an unbroken sweep of vision to the embouchure, and masked by forest from Porto da Lenha.  It is easily known by its two tall trees, and that nearest the sea, when viewed from the east, appears surmounted by what resemble the “Kangaroo’s Head:”  they are cones of regular shape, covered to the topmost twig with the lightest green Flagellaria.  The “bush” now becomes beautiful, rolling in bulging masses of verdure to the very edge of the clear brown stream.  As in the rivers of Guinea, the llianas form fibrous chains, varying in size from a packthread to a cable; now straight, then twisted; investing the trees with an endless variety of folds and embraces, and connecting neighbours by graceful arches like the sag of an acrobat’s rope.  Here and there a grotesque calabash contrasted with the graceful palms towering in air for warmth and light, or bending over water like Prince of Wales’s feathers.  The unvarying green was enlivened by yew-like trees with scarlet flowers, the “Burning Bush” of Sierra Leone, setting off the white boles of the cotton-trees; and the whole was edged by the yellow green of the quaint pandanus hung with heavy fruit.

A little beyond “Mariquita Nook” the right bank becomes a net-work of creeks, “obscure channels,” tortuous, slimy with mud, banked with the snake-like branches of trees, and much resembling the lower course of the Benin, or any other north equatorial African river; the forest is also full of large villages, invisible like the streams till entered.  A single tree, apparently growing out of the great stream-bed, showed shallow water as we passed the Ponte de tres Palmeiras; the three oil-palms are still there, but the easternmost is decaying.  At 2 P.M. we were in sight of the chief slaving settlement on the Congo, the Whydah of the river, Porto da Lenha.  Our charts have “Ponta de Linha,” three mistakes in as many words.  Some authorities, however, prefer Ponta da Lenha, “Woody Point,” from the piles flanking the houses; others, Ponte da Lenha, from a bridge built by the agent of Messrs. Tobin’s house over the single influent that divides the settlement.  Cruizers have often ascended thus far; the Baltimore barque of 800 tons went up and down safely in 1859, but now square-rigged ships, which seldom pass Zunga chya Kampenzi, send up boats when something is to be done higher up.