Miss Kingsley had to make was in her estimate of the traders. She found her self entirely dependent on their good offices, and quickly discovered that she could entirely trust them. Thanks to the "Agent," she visited places she could never otherwise have seen, and the respect and affection in which he is held by the native secured her safety in many perils. She owes much to his gracious hospitality.

He has bestowed himself-Allah only knows where on his small trading vessels, so that I might have his one cabin. He has fished me out of sea and fresh water with boat-hooks; he has continually given me good advice, which, if I had

only followed, would have enabled me to keep out of water and any other sort of affliction; and although he holds the meanest opinion of my intellect for going to such a place as West Africa for beetles, fishes and fetish, he has given me the greatest assistance in my work.

The charm of the Coast laid hold on Miss Kingsley as soon as she left Sierra Leone on her first voyage, and she saw that there was "any amount of work worth doing down there." The first visit was so promising that, on December 23d, 1894, she left Liverpool on a second voyage. She had been asked to travel with Lady MacDonald, who was going out to join her husband, then governor of Old Calabar, and, despite the fact that they were cast in an entirely different mould, the two ladies soon became attached friends. South of Gibraltar the interest of the voyage began. The Peak of Teneriffe displayed itself as usual as an entirely celestial phenomenon. Many people do not see the mountain, because they look straight before them, instead of raising their eyes to the glittering white triangle somewhere near the zenith. On certain days the Peak stands out clear from ocean to summit, looking every inch and more of its twelve thousand and eighty feet, but "whenever and however it may be seen, soft and dreamlike in the sunshine, or melodramatic and bizarre in the moonlight, it is one of the most beautiful things the eye of man may see." It is hard to judge whether it is superior, however, to Grand Canary, as seen from the sea.

When Miss Kingsley sailed past, the superb cone of Teneriffe stood out a deep purple against a serpent-green sky, separated from the brilliant blue ocean by a girdle of pink and gold cumulus, whilst Grand Canary and Lanzarote looked as though formed out of fantastic-shaped sunset cloud-banks turned into a solid mass by some enchanter's spell.

Sierra Leone looks best from the sea. Its capital, Free Town, "the Liverpool of West Africa," seems in the distance to be built of graystone, but most of its stores and houses are of painted wood, with corrugated iron roofs. Here and there is a thatched roof covered with creeping plants and inhabited by col

onies of insects. Some of the stores and churches are built of the local red stone. "In the crannies of these build

ings trailing plants covered with pretty mauve or yellow flowers take root, and everywhere, along the tops of the walls, and in the cracks of the houses, are ferns and flowering plants." The town has one central street, from which others run off at right angles. These are covered with green Bahama grass, save where they are so nearly perpendicular, that the heavy rains have swept them bare down to the red bed-rock. The fronts of the shops are taken away, and the walls are lined with shelves, on which rest bundles of gay-colored Manchester cottons and shawls, Swiss clocks, brass, copper and iron cooking pots. Inside the store you will see the proprietor, with his family and a few friends, all exceedingly plump and happy, having a social "shout" together. Natives walk along the springy turf of the streets at a brisk pace, carrying huge burdens on their heads. They take no notice where they are going, and sometimes charge recklessly into a section of bearers who have set down their loads right in the middle of the street "to have a friendly yell with some acquaintances." Then the uproar becomes simply terrific. Among the crowd of country people in Free Town walk stately Mohammedans from the western Soudan, wearing a long white loose-sleeved skirt, covered by a black or deep blue mohair or silk gown. These are the gentlemen of the native population, and add not a little to the

difficulty of missionary work. The noise, the smell, and the heat of Free Town greatly try a visitor, but he almost forgets these things as he studies the costume of the people.

The ordinary man in the street wears anything he may have been able to acquire, anyhow, and he does not fasten it on securely. I fancy it must be capillary attraction, or some other partially-understood force, that takes part in the matter. It is certainly neither braces nor buttons. There are of course some articles which from their very structure are fairly secure, such as an umbrella with the stick and ribs removed, or a shirt. This lastmentioned treasure, which usually becomes the property of the ordinary man from a female relative or admirer taking in white men's washing, is always worn flowing free, and has such a charm in itself that the happy possessor cares little what he continues his costume with-trousers, loin cloth, red flannel petticoat, or rice-bag drawers, being, as he would put it, "all same for one" to him.

One day when Miss Kingsley was in the outskirts of the town she saw a party of country people coming in to market. It was the wet season, and they had nothing on worth mentioning. Each carried a bundle done up in American cloth, with a closed umbrella tucked into it. When they got near the town they pulled up and solemnly dressed, holding umbrellas over each other during the operation. “Then, dignified and decorated, and each sporting his gingham, they marcheu into the town." The women's costumes are nearly as quaintly various as those of the men, but neater and cleaner. They themselves are picturesque figures, and occasionally very pretty.

A market-woman with her jolly brown face and laughing brown eyes-eyes all the softer for a touch of antimony-her ample form clothed in a lively print overall, made with a yoke at the shoulders, and a full long flounce which is gathered on to the yoke under the arms and falls fully to the feet; with her head done up in a yellow or red handkerchief, and her snowy white teeth gleaming through her vast smiles, is a mighty pleasant thing to see, and to talk to. But, Allah! the circumference of them!

Miss Kingsley's days at Cape Coast Castle were among the hottest but the most pleasant she spent on the Gold Coast. She pays special tribute to the kindness of the Rev. Dennis Kemp and his wife, of the Wesleyan Mission. The large Wesleyan church in the centre of the town far surpasses the cathedral at Sierra Leone, and the native members are taught to give, whilst "almost all the other native Christian bodies are content to be in a state of pauperized dependency on British subscriptions." Seen from the sea, the Gold Coast is a pleasant looking land, Its long lines of yellow sandy beach are backed by an almost continuous line of blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach. It is hard to think as you pass by that this region is so unhealthy as it really is, for the land stands high, and those great masses of mangrove swamp that you usually associate with a bad fever district are absent.

The voyage terminated at Calabar. Miss Kingsley was able to make a little visit to Fernando Po with Sir Claude and Lady MacDonald. This island is the most important on the coast of West Africa, and one of the most beautiful in the world. A great volcanic mass, with many craters, culminates in the magnificent cone, Clarence Peak. The island is heavily forested, almost to its peak. It is very rich in oil palms and tree ferns, and in the undergrowth there is an immense variety of ferns and mosses. Sugarcane grows wild, which is an uncommon thing in West Africa. The natives, the Bubis, care nothing for trade. They covet a little rum and a few beads, but they bend their attention ordinarily to catching porcupines or the beautiful little gazelles, grey on the back and white underneath, with which the island abounds. When the Bubi wants to buy rum or beads he extracts palm oil from the rich supply of nuts. The language depends so much on gesture that they cannot talk in it to each other after dark. The people are ostentatiously unclothed. The Spanish authorities insist that when they come into town they should have something on, but when they turn homeward they strip off their bit of cotton cloth outside the town and put it into their baskets.

Yet, despite his contempt for clothes, the Bubi is a dandy in his own way. His idea of decoration is to spread a plaster of tola pomatum over his body and cover his head with a palm-leaf hat adorned with birds' feathers. One chief fastened on his gorgeous headgear with a row of wooden bonnet pins. Pieces of wood stuck through the ear serve as earrings, whilst bits of the backbones of pythons, teeth, feathers, and antelope horns are hung as charms round the neck; round the upper arm they wear bracelets made of ivory or beads.

After her return from Fernando Po, Miss Kingsley spent four or five months collecting fish and insects in the Calabar River, and the woods around it. She formed a friendship with Miss Slessor, of Okyon, who had been living eighteen years at Calabar, and was able to give her invaluable help in the matter of fetish and native customs. This lady has won profound esteem from the natives, and has done a great work among them. In May Miss Kingsley started for Congo Français, intending to collect fishes in the Ogowé River, as the yield in the Calabar proved disappointing. She had plenty of time to study the habits of West Coast rivers. All the really great rivers, save the Congo, come out to sea with as much mystery as possible, lounging lazily along through numberless channels which communicate with each other, and are bordered by green-black walls of mangroves. The river looks like a pathway of polished metal, for it is as heavily weighted as is possible with evil-smelling mud. At high water a small canoe can thread the mangrove swamp for miles, but care must be taken lest the crocodiles snap at the 'Ittle bark. You can watch the land being made from the edge of the waters. A mangrove seed lights on a mud bank; others join it, and struggle on together, forming a network of roots, stopping mud and palm leaves, and thus making the way ready for other mangrove and for pines and palms.

First the screw-pines come and live among them; then the wine-palm and various creepers, and then the oil-palm; and the débris of those plants being greater, and making better soil than dead

mangroves, they work quicker, and the mangrove is doomed. Soon the salt waters are shut right out, the mangrove dies, and that bit of Africa is made. It is very interesting to get into these regions; you see along the river-bank a rich, thick, lovely wall of soft wooded plants, and behind this you find great stretches of death -miles and miles sometimes of gaunt white mangrove skeletons standing on longer slime, and through the crust of grey stuff that is not yet earth, and is no which you can sink into rotting putrefaction. Yet, long after you are dead, buried and forgotten, this will become a forest of soft-wooded plants and palms; and, finally, of hard-wooded trees. Districts of this description you will find in great sweeps of Kama country, for example, and in the rich low regions up to the base of the Sierra del Cristal and the Rumby range.

People speak of the lifelessness of mangrove swamps, but Miss Kingsley found them far from lifeless. Crocodiles abounded, there were quantities of flies, hopping mud-fish, crabs, cat-fish. There were no birds, save the grey parrots that passed over them in the evening, hoarsely squawking. After nightfall the swamp is full of noises-grunts, splashes, and, above all, the strange whine and sighing cough of the croco

dile.

After passing a succession of such swamps, Miss Kingsley reached the French Congo. On her former visit to Africa, she had met the agent-general of one of the great trading companies. He gave her permission to collect fish in the Ogowe, the largest river between the Niger and the Congo. In the forests along this waterway live some notoriously savage tribes. Chief of these are the Fans, who have made their appearance here within the memory of living men, and are in a state of migration seawards. They are a bright and active race, who form a strange contrast to the slothful and lethargic tribes on the West Coast. The French Congo has a coast line of about nine hundred miles, with an area of some two hundred and twenty thousand square miles, and a population variously estimated at from two to five millions. Miss Kingsley found a warm welcome at Gaboon, the great trading station of the French Congo, one of the

safer, for in the grass and lycopodium there are nearly certain to be snakes galore, and the chances are you may force yourself into the privacy of a gigantic python's sleeping place.

However well you may know the forest by day it is quite another world after sunset. Miss Kingsley found nothing so fascinating as a night in an African forest, but those who have not fallen under its spell feel this the most awful life in death imaginable. It is like being shut up in a library whose books you cannot read. All the while you are "tormented, terrified and bored." Round Talagouga Miss Kingsley tasted some of these sylvan delights. Several times she came across a long trail of flattened undergrowth, with a musky smell which bore witness that a boa constrictor had recently gone that way. Twice she was in danger of being stalked by native hunters, but as it is their custom to get as near as they can before firing she escaped with her life.

Miss Kingsley's heart was still set on getting further up the Ogowé. After much difficulty she secured a canoe and four Igalwa natives, who spoke trade English. When they reached Njole the authorities were very reluctant to allow an English lady to endanger her life in the rapids. But Miss Kingsley was not to be denied. The party pushed up the Ogowé. In two hours they were facing their first rapid. Grey black masses of smoothed rock rose in all directions out of the whirling water. When the sun shone it covered them with a halo of soft light blue haze. This, with the forest covered hillsides and the little beaches of glistening white sand, formed one of the most perfect of Nature's pictures. The canoe hugged the right-hand bank, keeping as much as possible out of the swiftest current. When the natives could not force the boat round a projecting point the head man shouted to Miss Kingsley, "Jump for bank, sar!" She then leaped ashore, followed by half the crew.

Such banks! sheets, and walls, and rubbish-heaps of rock, mixed up with trees, fallen and standing. One appalling corner I shall not forget, for I had to jump at a rock wall, and hang on to it in a manner more befitting an insect than an insect

hunter, and then scramble up it into a close-set forest, heavily burdened with boulders of all sizes.

Whilst Miss Kingsley was climbing across the promontory the crew were hauling the canoe round the point by means of the strong chain fixed in the bow in readiness for such emergencies. Then all got on board and paddled away till they met their next tribulation. Night fell before they reached the Fan village for which they were steering. They had only starlight enough to see the flying foam of the rapids, not enough to detect the great trees that had fallen from the bank into the water. They fought their way round corners, though they could not jump on the banks in the darkness. About half past nine, however, they got into a savage rapid:

We fought it inch by inch. The canoe jammed herself on some barely sunken rocks in it. We shoved her off over them. She tilted over and chucked us out. The rocks round being just awash, we survived and got her straight again, and got into her and drove her unmercifully; she struck again and bucked like a broncho, and we fell in heaps upon each other, but stayed inside that time-the men by the aid of their intelligent feet, I by clinching my hands into the bush-rope lacing which ran round the rim of the canoe, and the meaning of which I did not understand when I left Talagouga. We sorted ourselves out hastily and sent her at it again. Smash went a sorely-tried pole and a paddle. Round and round we spun in an exultant whirlpool, which, in a light-hearted maliciously joking way, hurled us tail first out of it into the current.

It was impossible to push their way further up the river, so the canoe was allowed to drift downward at a terrific pace. Two of the men stood in the bows to pole it off the rocks. Despite every effort they got many a severe shaking. At last they were tightly wedged on a large black reef. They tied the canoe firmly to the rock and scrambled on to an island where, after much searching, they found a little vil lage. It was a collection of palm matbuilt huts, very low and squalid. The villagers, painted vermilion all over their nearly naked bodies, were danc