and gold could bestow. The deputies of the governors and captains having sworn, the king swore deliberately, invoking God and his fetish to kill him, first, if he did not keep the treaty, if the other party had spoken true; and secondly, if he did not punish them, if they had spoken false.

CHAPTER XXVI.

PEOPLE AND MANNERS OF ASHANTEE.

ASHANTEE is supposed to contain about a million of inhabitants, 200,000 of whom are able to bear arms. The men are well made, and their countenances are often European. It is only among the higher orders of women, who are exempt from labour, that beauty can be found. Among these I have not only seen the finest figures imaginable, but regular Grecian features.

Both men and women are particularly clean in their persons; the latter washing themselves, and the former being washed by them, from head to foot, every morning, with warm water and Portuguese soap, and using afterwards vegetable butter. Occasionally small delicate patterns, in green or white paint, are traced on their cheeks and temples. The lower ranks of people are commonly dirty. The heads of young women are shaved in patterns as intricate in appearance as those of a rich carpet. Upper cloths are generally worn.

Coomassie is built on the side of a large rocky

ma.

hill, surrounded by a marsh, the springs of which supply the city with water, and beyond this it is. encircled by a beautiful forest. It occupies an oblong nearly four miles in circumference, without including the suburbs of Assafoo and BantaFour of the principal streets are half a mile in length, and from fifty to a hundred yards in width. I observed a new one laid out, and a line was stretched on each side to make it regular. The streets were all named, and a captain presided over each. The palace was situated in a long and wide street, running through the middle of the town, from which it was shut out by a wall. I reckoned twenty-seven streets. Several trees were scattered about the town for the recreation of the inhabitants.

Four other large towns, that is to say, Soota, Marmpon, Becqua, and Kokofoo, were built at the same time with Coomassie; the governors of these are allowed, like the king, to wear their sandals studded with gold.

The houses of Coomassie are shaped like an English barn, and join each other so as to form a regular street. The walls are constructed with two rows of stakes, the space between is filled with a gravelly clay, and the whole plastered on the outside with the same material. The roof is composed of a frame-work of bamboo thatched with palm leaves, and the interlacing bamboos that appear within are painted black and polished. The floors are of clay and stone, and are daily washed with an infusion of red ochre. The fronts of the houses are ornamented with cane, laid in various patterns on the walls, while soft, and covered with a thin coating of plaster. Arcades and piazzas

are common, and the houses of the captains have a gallery on the outside.

The doors are made of an entire piece of wood, cut, with great labour, out of the cotton tree; and strips of wood, differently cut and painted, are afterwards nailed across. The locks are from Houssa, and quite original. The windows are of open wood work, carved in fanciful and intricate patterns, and painted red. The frames are frequently cased with gold. When the house is two stories high, the under room is divided by a wall, to support the rafters for the upper. A house consists of an indefinite number of areas, from fifteen to thirty-six feet square, built on the four sides and connected by long courts. The rubbish and offal of each house is burnt every morning at the back of the street, and the people are as cleanly in their dwellings as their persons.

The piazza which runs along the interior of the wall that shuts out the king's palace from the street, is two hundred yards long, and inhabited by his captains and other attendants. Piles of skulls, and drums ornamented with skulls, are frequent in this piazza: over it runs a small gallery.

With all their tremendous exhibition of blood and bones, I am not certain that the Ashantees are a revengeful or a sanguinary people. The display of skulls proceeds, not from cruelty, but from the pride of conquest: and the streams of blood flow from good, though dreadfully mistaken motives; the propitiating a divinity, and the honouring departed friends.

I saw the bed-room of Odumata, which was only eight feet square, but, being hung round with a variety of gold and silver ornaments, it had

a rich appearance. The bed was about five feet high, and composed of pillows of the silk cotton, piled one upon another. I was assured that the king of Gaman had steps of solid gold to ascend to his bed.

Perhaps the average residents of Coomassie may

not amount to more than from twelve to fifteen thousand; but the Ashantees persist in saying that the population, if collected, would be a hundred thousand; many families having slaves, and others children, residing in the villages and plantations near the city, employed in cultivating the ground.

The markets are held daily, from about eight o'clock in the morning till sun-set. Among the articles exposed for sale were beef and mutton, cut in small pieces for soup; wild hog's, deer's, and monkey's flesh; salt and dried fish from the coast; yams, plantains, corn, sugar-cane, rice, encruma, a mucilaginous vegetable, something like asparagus, but richer; peppers, vegetable butter, oranges, papaws, pine-apples, bananas; large snails, smoke-dried and stuck on small sticks like herring-bone; eggs for fetish; pitto, palm wine, rum; pipes, beads, looking-glasses, sandals, silk and cotton cloths, white and blue cotton thread, small pillows, calabashes, and gunpowder.

The currency of Ashantee is gold dust eight takoos make an ackie; sixteen ackies make an ounce, and forty a pereguin. The ounce is valued at £.4 sterling.

The better sort of people eat soup of beef, mutton, fowls, or dried fish, abstaining from the one of these that is sacred to their fetish, and ground

nuts strewed in blood; the poorer class make their soup of dried deer, monkey's flesh, and frequently of the pelts of skins. Yams, plantains, and foofoos, are commonly eaten. Corn is roasted on the stalk. Eggs are forbidden by the fetish, and the Ashantees cannot be persuaded to taste milk. They drink palm wine, and pitto, which is made from dried corn, and tastes like brisk small ale.

The king has 3,333 wives, a mystical number, which is never exceeded, and which is made up on every vacancy; but out of this number he presents wives to such of his subjects as have. distinguished themselves. About six of these ladies reside in the palace; many of them occupy a part of the king's country residence; many live in a corner of the marsh, and others in two streets appropriated exclusively to themselves. No person approaches them but their female relations, and the king's messengers; and when they walk out, which is seldom, they are preceded and surrounded by little boys with whips, who lash every one that does not quit the path, or jump into the bush, with his hands before his eyes.

The sisters of the king may marry, or intrigue, with whom they please, if the man be handsome and robust; the Ashantees thus providing for the personal superiority of their future king. When the king's sister dies, unless the rank of her husband be originally elevated, he is expected to kill himself; and if he hesitate, he is informed that he is the slave of his children, and must attend them wherever they go. When a son is born, the father acknowledges himself its vassal.

Wives are bought with gold, and their infidelity