Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/454

 number to distinguish it from the neighbouring bamboo huts,—you couldn't miss it in a London fog, for were you once to get into the village street, you would be bound to run up against it, as it stands right across the top.

It is considerately furnished inside. In the room in which I await the tide turn there are two chests of drawers, a real dining table, nine chairs, another table, three looking-glasses and a big wooden bedstead of the native type—a wooden bench without sides, but with a head and foot-board; one usually sees this sort of bedstead basking in the sun in the street. There are four I see now at it in the broad village street below me, to the end of compelling the surplus parasitic population to leave. On the one in this room lies a heap of muddled dirty clothes, giving it an air of being the one thing in the house that is used. The rest seems all "for dandy." On the table, scattered anyhow together, are glass scent-bottles, a hanging-lamp, framed oleographs of English farmyard scenes; and amongst them an old album full of faded photographs, evidently once the valued treasure of some white man who is dead now; for were he living he would never have parted with it, after pasting in against the pictures those little English wild roses and bits of heather and bluebells.

At last Eveke rushes up with one of those spasmodic attacks of activity which he simulates, and which never impose on any one but himself, and we all go aboard. Yesterday I met a lady on the shore who asked me if I would take her to Gaboon. I said, as any skipper would, "delighted, my dear"; and here she is sitting on the top of the cargo with her head just exactly in the proper position to get it bashed in, or knocked off by the boom; and her five bundles, one tin box, a peck of limes and a husband. In fact, things are in such a muddle on board that before we weigh anchor, I decide to stow cargo, as befits the pupil of Captain Murray. No black man can stow cargo. I say so viciously, from my canoe experiences. The Lafayette's "hold" is in a condition that would bleach the hair of any "British African" officer on the Coast, even if he only caught sight of it through a telescope. For it partakes strongly of the arrangement of a rubbish heap; the lady passenger's belongings, mine, the crew's, the deck