is a temporary hubbub, but no one is hurt
—nobody ever is hurt; then the banging and
howling is resumed, and I relapse into
despondency. Or I drag myself to the window,
from whence I get a glimpse of a great bare
rock, rising sheer up out of the sea; and I
watch the long, heavy swell of the waves
which set against it, and then break and send
up a mass of white glittering spray. But
it makes one melancholy to watch that
long, and it takes away all the hope to
see those bright drops tumble back again
into the sullen sea. It is impossible even
to walk along the summit of it, and thence
look towards England.

Can I call this my life upon the Gold
Coast? It is mere tropical vegetation. The
power to move about, which is the distinction
of an animal, forsakes the European
soon after he has landed on these shores.
He feels all powers of will and thought
exuding from his pores, and he becomes a
sickly sponge glued to his rock. Brute nature
here is gorgeous and powerful. She gets
a mastery over the minds of Europeans, and
asserts dominion over poor subjugated man.
Nobody who has once vegetated in some
remote English station or garrison of that
belt of land, known as the Gold Coast of
tropical West Africa, can ever hear reference
to it without again seeing the white,
glaring, scorching rocks and fiery sands along
the sea; and, inland, the unbroken verdure,
the eternal green of the monotonous
savannahs, and the great tracts of impenetrable
bush. He sees, again, the deltas of the many
rivers—the rivers which wash down gold—
teeming with life. The trunks of the
mangroves which abound there are coated with
oysters and land-crabs, and their roots form
a fantastic net-work arching above the
steaming slime and mud. All the birds of
the air seem to have taken up their abode
here; but who will dare lift up the dark
mantle of death that shrouds this jungle, or
follow them into their pestilential dwelling-
place?

And then the forests, and their
overwhelming superabundance of life! They
swarm with the parrots and parroquets,
screeching from every bough; the guinea-
fowl wanders in flocks of hundreds, and her
plaintive cry resounds through the woods;
the grouse and partridge, quail, turkey, woodcock,
snipe and plover, stork, crane, heron
and spoonbill, not as we know them, but in
flocks of thousands and thousands, run
through the thick woods; fly across the
open, or wander by the banks of rivers and
lakes. The kingfisher here puts on his most
brilliant attire, and the weaver bird hangs
her pretty, fairy-like nest by a single long
thread to the tip of a slender branch.
Antelopes graze in herds with their sentinels on
the watch; antelopes of all sizes, from the
delicate little creature, like a young kitten on
long legs, to the harte-beast as big as an ox.

Lying in wait for their prey are patakoos a
kind of hyæna leopards and chetahs. These
forests, too, contain the army in chief of the
monkey tribe; they, and the tree-cricket,
make night hideous in the woods, and they
and the parrots make day intolerable in
barracks and houses, and all kinds of
habitations.

But when all this has been recalled,—
animals and plants, forests of mighty
baobabs, date-palms and mahogany-trees, and
enormous grasses with branching stems
that cover boundless plains; even when we
have given a moment of tender thought to
the star-apple and the cream fruit, the Gold
Coast pine, the paw-paw, the sour and
sweet saps, the water-wine and, by all
consent, most exquisite of earthly fruit, the
mangoes, we find our recollection of the
coast imperfect, if it is not blown across with
the winds. There is the harmattan, dry and
cold, which cracks our furniture, peels off the
veneer of our English goods, and parches and
cracks the very skin of our bodies; and there
are the fierce tornado, and the sudden
whirlwind bursting upon us with its electric
crashes.

No wonder that the European sinks
oppressed and overburdened in the whirl of life
around him. The very natives do! and they
ought to be used to it.

The natives stand in ignominious contrast
to the overpowering wealth of the scenes in
which they live; beneath the blaze of the
fierce tropical sun, and through forests in
which the very trees are gorgeously clothed
with orchids heaped about in brilliant
festoons. He bears on his head an earthen
vessel of palm-oil, or carries two or three
quills of gold-dust, the result of his own
industry in washing the sand after the rains.
His sole article of clothing is a Manchester
remâl, or length of chequered cotton, girded
round his loins. But he knows the value of
his own merchandise, and of that for which
he intends to exchange it. He is a bird by
no means to be caught with chaff. He will
not change his palm-oil for a bunch of
feathers, nor his gold for a string of beads;
neither does he affect any article of European
clothing,nor hanker after any produce of
European civilisation. He wants rum, the strong,
coarse American rum, and he knows to a
teaspoonful how much he ought to get of it. He
wants, from time to time, a new remâl,
also a cloth or blanket to throw over his
shoulders on state occasions, and a musket
to make a row with, and fire off when he
keeps custom. But he wants no food, because
the maize springs up for him almost without
cultivation, and his women pound it
between two stones, and add water to make
a paste which he calls kankee, and on this he
gorges himself with great relish. Sometimes
his soul lusteth for meat, and then the black
snails of the forest, as big as a fist, furnish.
him with a soup of which palm-oil is also an