then, gin ye hae the mind, hand it on till him wi' word fram ane o' them that'll ne'er see bonnie Loch Merkland mair. No but what they wad be blithe to see me: there's no black bluid atween me an' ma kin; 'tis not wi' me as it is wi'-" he jerked his thumb towards the white bungalow among its trees a quarter-mile away and nearer to the Tank of Sao Thomé. "Ye wull no' be takin' yer leave o' him, aw'm thenkin'?"

"Of Colonel Travis? It is just him that I am riding to see. Which reminds me, my time"

"Rest ye, caillach," growled the old man, putting his importunate little pet aside. "To see him?" he glanced up so keenly, and hung upon the word so long, that the swish of the horsehair fly-whisk and the murmured chanty with which Ibn Ali stilled the restlessfooted Arab at the gate, sounded near in the silence. "Mon, what taks ye till Travis?"

"He has sent for me," said Justin; but the other waved the reason aside as irrelevant.

"He hates ye like the vera teffle," he said.

"I might dispute that, Mr. Chisholm; but at any rate I have never given him an excuse for ill-will, and have cercainly never hated him. That we have failed-to-how shall I say?—"

"Tcha! the fallow semply detests ye. He has sent for ye?-and for what? Ye sail to-morrow at latest: he knows sae much, nae doot. Mon, he wad fain ha' dune ye an injury this mony a year, an' the noo's his opportunity. Hae a care, Justin, hae a care!"

"I anticipate nothing”

"Ye winna be brakin' bread wi' the mon," insisted the other, coming to details.

"It is most unlikely. I do not expect to be bidden. I take the matter in hand-as to which I am wholly in the dark-to be of a business complex

ion; but, if he should offer hospitality"

"Decline as ye value yer life, mon, and dinna pit ae drop o' his liquor till yer lip. Oh, I ken weel what aw'm sayin'; ou, aye; I could hae pit a spoke in his wheel mair than aince since we twa fell to leevin' the life o' the native. There hass bin queer doings in the bungalow over there if I may believe my people. The fallow is a violent fallow, with a weakness for bhang, and 'tis ane that neither kens nor cares what he diz when in his tantrums. What signifies a punkah-wallah more or less, or a hubshi Kaffir-boy, think ye? Snake-bite he laid it to, and it may hae bin. 'Tis strange nane o' ma people die that way. I am no the Governor, and hanna fashed masel' aboot ither folks' maitters; but, ye air ma frien', and gin ye air for the Ca Sao Thomé I gang wi' ye."

"Indeed, old friend, ye will not!" laughed Justin, with just a touch of impatience. "I thank ye from my heart for the offer, but I am persuaded it is needless, and if it were otherwise the little man leaned slightly forward in his seat and shrugged his shoulders as one who would imply that he was a soldier and could answer for himself. "See here, Chisholm, to set your mind at rest, I will look in upon you on my way back, say in half an hour from now."

"An' thot iss weel thocht of, too; and gin ye be no' here in forty minutes, I wull raise my people and do masel' the honor o' calling upo' ma neighbor for the first time, and speirin' for ye."

Justin arose, declining more wine; but his host, with something still to impart, disclosed an unwonted difficulty in making his point. "Yer pairdon, ma frien'; ye'll no' thenk me inqueesitive, but-ye are for London; aweel, London used to be a gey costly place. Naething for naething there, an' nae muckle for yer siller."

I have never yet embarked upon any steamer, whether bound for West Africa, across the Atlantic, or elsewhere, without harboring at first a decidedly unpleasant impression of the passengers on board. Most men who have travelled on the sea will recognize this feeling. Faces unlit by the sparks struck out by personal intercourse are seldom very cheerful to look upon; and just at the time of embarkation there is an uncertainty as to the safety of one's boxes, and a general atmosphere of hurry and bustle, not sweetening to the temper. For some minds, too, there is added a depressing sense of isolation as the shores of England fade to a vague outline on the horizon, and we find ourselves on the stretching distances of the sea with a number of unknown persons for our only company. We are not in a charitable mood, and look forward with some misgiving to passing seventeen days or more on board. After a few voyages a man learns to treat such feelings philosophically, and realizes that these unknown faces will take on a different color when he comes to know them better. This better knowledge comes quickly on some voyages; but the terrors of the Bay of Biscay delay its achievement for a day or two on boats bound for the West Coast of Africa. In the meantime we have an uncomfortable sense that the attitude of distrust with which we view our fellow-passengers is probably reciprocal; and only the bolder spirits on board venture to break the ice which covers the personality of those stiff figures that stalk up and down the deck with strained and resolute faces, as though they were in danger of dissolution from want of exercise. I myself drove down to the landing-stage at Liverpool in no very cheerful mood, and suspected my cab

man of a design to be subtly ironical when he remarked sympathetically that I was having a fine day for my sail. It is not probable, however, that he knew I was bound for the West Coast of Africa, and I acquit him of malice prepense. For the rest, the boat in which I was to sail presented a holiday appearance enough, being full of trippers bound for the Canary Islands, for whose benefit the band of the Liverpool Sailors' Home was discoursing something not unlike music on the upper deck.

An

Las Palmas, the port of Grand Canary, is usually the first place of call for the Elder-Dempster steamers. occasional visit is made to Teneriffe, a picturesque island full of green gorges that stretch away between the hills that front the harbor, and possessing a fine peak about which raptures are said to be permissible when the mists allow you to see it. Las Palmas is not so attractive. The hills that rise from the sea behind the town are brown and thirsty-looking, and the land looks waterless and poor. The whole scene has a curious air of unreality. The town itself looks like an enlarged toyshop, and the hills have an odd artificial appearance. We might fancy we were

looking upon a water-color sketch, pretty but uninspired, a smile of the lips but not of the eyes, "a face without a heart." Inland, I am told, things are different, where the hill streams are used to irrigate the fruit farms, and green things are allowed to grow. A number of half-clad Spaniards swarm on board demanding exorbitant prices for their wares; and to these cheerful rascals the Englishman, accustomed in his own country to assume the honesty of his fellowcountrymen and give the price asked for without demur, is apt to fall an

easy prey. We are already half way to the Tropics, and under the sunny skies of Las Palmas the lack of clothing of the dark-skinned urchins that dive for money in the sea seems as natural as it will seem later at Sierra Leone.

After Las Palmas we see no more of holiday-makers, and the West Africans are left to themselves. Yet the five days' sail between the Canaries and Sierra Leone is as pleasant a part of the voyage as any. Whosoever wishes to lounge uninterruptedly and trouble himself not at all about anything in the world save the art of lighting his pipe in a gentle sea-breeze, will here find a warm and equable temperature most proper to his purposes. His only distraction will be to watch the flyingfishes and an occasional shoal of dolphins, or perhaps some grampus or other mighty monster of the tropical sea may leave his bower in the hollow billows and keep the steamer company a while. It would be pleasant to cruise here in a private yacht, which would give us an opportunity to enjoy that perfect serenity of mind and climate, without the prospect of ending the passage in the sultry harbor of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Yet the newcomer will hardly be inclined to abuse Sierra Leone, for with it comes his first impression of the Tropics, which is generally one of novelty and beauty, undarkened yet by the shadows of lassitude and malaria. From six to nine o'clock in the morning in the dry season it is pleasant enough to be ashore there. The crowd of chattering natives, the strange shrubs and trees unseen before, and the rich languor of tropical vegetation, fill the senses so completely that we are disinclined to consider too curiously the other side of the picture.

The merriest and noisiest port of call on the coast is Cape Coast Castle, where some hundred and fifty natives

paddle out in surf boats with bales of kola nuts on board, shouting strange keyless chants the while, and enjoying themselves with all that unrecoverable abandon of the natural man. The loading is done with the aid of cranes dropped from the steamer to the surf boats, whose crews shout and yell in a struggle to be the first to catch the ropes. Two men on rival boats will lay hold of one rope simultaneously, and hang on with the right hand while conducting a pugilistic encounter with the left. But the Cape Coast negro does not require a rival to set him talking. Among the same crew there are differences of opinion that are quite enough to raise a pretty clamor in themselves. "One man say we go do this: one man say we no go do this," was the lucid explanation of a native with whom I had some conversation, and whose language first introduced me to the jargon of Coast English. Meanwhile a number of fish-like creatures go swimming to and fro in the water, either to carry the crane-end to their own boat or out of sheer fun and high spirits. At times, in the midst of the gabble, a weird chant crosses the waters as another crew comes paddling up to add to the confusion.

From the Fanti boatmen the Hausa traders, not a few of whom travel up and down in the Coast steamers, are easily distinguishable by their thinner lips and finer features, wearing white gowns for the most part and with huge silver rings upon their fingers. The Fantis never let one of these whiterobed fellows get aboard without disputing hotly with him the amount of their fare for bringing him out to the steamer. I saw one unfortunate Hausa, who refused to comply with their demands, pushed neatly into the sea amid shouts of laughter. The yelling of the boatmen, the noise of the crane, the confusion when a bale tips overboard into the sea, the cries of the

passengers climbing aboard by ladder with all their worldly goods in a bundle between their strong white teeth, combine to make up a pandemonium such as you must go to the West Coast to see and hear, for you will not find its like anywhere else beneath the sun.

Long before the boat reaches Cape Coast Castle, that mutual distrust I spoke of is sure to vanish, and the newcomer will have begun to form very pleasant ideas of the men who go to work in West Africa. After a little talk with men who know the country and treat its peculiar attributes as a matter of course, a trip to West Africa no longer appears so strange a leap into the unknown as it did when it was talked of in England. It is true that our first ideas of the country are probably drawn from a series of very tall travellers' tales. None are more expert than West Africans in weaving stories of insects of all shapes and sizes, and of the horrible ailments these creatures cause. A newcomer is considered fair game, and it is likely that his nights will be disturbed by dreams of little worms that crawl under the toe-nails of men who venture to go slipperless, and burrow there until the nail is painfully removed.

He is pre

pared also to see without surprise a long worm emerging below the knee, having first successfully accomplished a journey through the upper part of his body. But indeed the tales of travellers, though so often untrue to fact, do yet contain a certain truth to spirit. We feel very acutely those hardships and difficulties which overtake us personally: but we cannot easily convey to another the same sharp sense we had of them. That other was not present, and did not suffer as we did: and if we would produce in him an impression near as vivid as our own, we are almost bound to call in some slight exaggeration to help us. The traveller's tale is often truer to the spirit of

his adventure than ever so literal a rendering of the incidents could be. I regard it, therefore, as inadvisable to cross-examine the salted Coaster upon so mere a trifle as truth to fact, and am content to discount his stories as we discount a leading article upon party politics.

West Africa seems to exercise a kind of fascination over men who have lived there for any time. There is a saying, "Once a Coaster, always a Coaster": and out of the most terrible of the stories told to newcomers upon West African boats this deep-seated love of life on the Coast invariably emerges. Fever-stricken men leave for England swearing mighty oaths they never will return, but a few restless months at home and they are back again, ready enough, no doubt, to abuse West Africa, but secretly subject to its grim fascination.

The greater number of West Africans are much-travelled men. Before you have been long amongst them you will hear some account of most countries in the world. One man has cut mahogany in Mexico, others can tell you something of Matabeleland, Rhodesia, Canada, or the West Indies, and you will find few to whom India and South Africa are unknown. This means, I suppose, that a certain number of them are of the type nicknamed in England "the rolling stone," a kind of man at whom stay-at-home people are much inclined to sniff. I think. however, it is more profitable to remember the number of disagreeable faults from which these roving spirits are free. My friend has planted tobacco in Central Africa, tea in Ceylon, has had a ranch in the Argentine, and has shot big game in India: and the church-going householder in England shakes his head at him, and wishes to know why he is unable to stick to any one thing. But in truth the answer is a simple one. He does not want to