Page:The land of fetish.pdf/86

 houses, covers a frontage of some two miles. The native inhabitants of Lagos and the surrounding country, with the exception of the Porto Novans, who are pagans, are Mohammedans, belonging principally to the Yoruba tribe, which appears to be an offshoot of the Houssa race. They are a quiet, orderly, and industrious people, and form a pleasing contrast to the idle and insolent, so-called Christians, of Sierra Leone, and the lazy tribes of the Gold Coast.

As cowries form the small coinage of the country, and are in universal use, I thought I might as well obtain a few for small purchases; so, as soon as I was settled down, I gave my boy a couple of sovereigns and sent him out to get change. Half-an-hour afterwards, as I was smoking in the verandah, I saw him coming along the Marina followed by a procession of some twenty men and women, each of whom carried a small sack on his, or her, head. The whole crowd turned into the yard, and disappeared from my view. Presently I heard the trampling of feet and a rattling sound in my room, and, on going to see what was the matter, I found it full of natives, with an immense heap of cowries piled up in the centre of the floor. I thought that I should be ruined, and said to my boy,

"What's all this? What do all these people want?"