in Africa. You take them as a matter of course if you are
outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it)
you will look on them as a blessing and a curiosity. For
lower down, particularly in “ the Rivers,” these things are rarely
to be had, and never in such perfection as here ; and to see
again lettuces, yellow oranges, and tomatoes bigger than
marbles is a sensation and a joy. Onions also there are, and
if you are wise you will buy them when outward bound. If
you are speculative in the bargain you will take as many
as you can get, for here you may buy them from four to five
shillings the box, and you can sell them below for any sum
between twelve shillings and a sovereign.
Here, too, are beads, but for the most part of dull colour
and cheap quality. B e a n s , too, are more than well represented.
Horse-eye beans, used for playing warry; vast, pantomimesized
beans, the insides of which being removed, and a few
shot put in, make a pleasant rattle to hang at the wrist; and
evil Calabar beans, which can serve no good end at all here,
and which it seems insolent to sell in open market, in a town
where poisoning is said to be so prevalent that its own Bishop
declares “ small social gatherings are almost unknown from
the fear of it.” 1 ,
The piles of capsicums and chillies, the little heaps of
Reckitt’s Blue, vivid-coloured Berlin wools, pumpkins, pineapples,
and alligator pears, give rich and brilliant touches of
colour, and relieve the more sombre tones of kola nuts, old
iron, antelope horns, monkey skins, porcupine quills, and snails.
These snails are a prominent feature in the market in a quiet
way: they are used beaten up to help to make the sauce for palm
oil chop ; and they are shot alive on to the floor in heaps,
and are active and nomadic : whereby it falls out that people
who buy other things such as vegetables, Berlin wool, or meat,
are liable to find one of these massive gastropods mixed up in
the affair. Treading on one of them is, for a nervous person,
as alarming as the catastrophe of treading on one of the native
black babies with which the market floor abounds. There are
half a hundred other indescribabilia, and above all hovers the
peculiar Sierra Leone smell and the peculiar Sierra Leone noise.
1 Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years.
One of the chief features of Free Town are the jack crows.
Some writers say they are peculiar to Sierra Leone, others
that they are not, but both unite in calling them Picathartes
gymnocephalus. To the white people who live in daily contact
with them they are turkey-buzzards; to the natives, Yubu.
Anyhow they are evil-looking fowl, and no ornament to the
roof-ridges they choose to .sit on. The native Christians
ought to put a row of spikes along the top of their cathedral to
keep them off; the beauty of that edifice is very far from great,
and it cannot carry off the effect produced by the row of these
noisome birds as they sit along its summit, with their wings
arranged at all manner of different angles in an ‘ all gone
way. One bird perhaps will have one straight out in front,
and the other casually disposed at' right-angles, another both
straight out in front, and others again with both hanging
hopelessly down, but none with them neatly and tidily folded
up, as decent birds’ wings should be. They all give the impression
of having been extremely drunk the previous evening,
and of having subsequently fallen into some sticky abomination—
into blood for choice. Being the scavengers« of Free
Town, however, they are respected by the local authorities
and preserved ; and the natives tell me you never see either a
young or a dead one. The latter is a thing you would not
expect, for half of them look as if they could not live through
the afternoon. They also told me that when you got close to
them, they had a “ ’trong, ’trong ’n iff; ’niff too much.” I
did not try, but I am quite willing to believe this statement.
The other animals most in evidence in the streets are, first
and foremost, goats and sheep. I have to lump them together,
for it is exceedingly difficult to tell one from the other. All
along the Coast the empirical rule is that sheep carry their
tails down, and goats carry their tails u p ; fortunately you
need not worry much anyway, for they both “ taste rather
like the nothing that the world was made of,” as Frau Buch-
holtz says, and own in addition a fibrous texture, and a certain
twang. Small cinnamon-coloured cattle are to be got
here, but horses there are practically none. Now and again
some one who does not see why a horse should not live here
as well as at Accra or Lagos imports one, but it always