To The Gold Coast for Gold Volume II Part 1

To The Gold Coast for Gold.

Vol. II.

by Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron.

CHAPTER XII.

THE Sa LEONITE AT HOME AND ABROAD.

In treating this part of the subject I shall do my best to avoid bitterness and harsh judging as far as the duty of a traveller--that of telling the whole truth--permits me. It is better for both writer and reader to praise than to dispraise. Most Englishmen know negroes of pure blood as well as 'coloured persons' who, at Oxford and elsewhere, have shown themselves fully equal in intellect and capacity to the white races of Europe and America. These men afford incontestable proofs that the negro can be civilised, and a high responsibility rests upon them as the representatives of possible progress. But hitherto the African, as will presently appear, has not had fair play. The petting and pampering process, the spirit of mawkish reparation, and the coddling and high-strung sentimentality so deleterious to the tone of the colony, were errors of English judgment pure and simple. We can easily explain them.

The sad grey life of England, the reflection of her climate, has ever welcomed a novelty, a fresh excitement. Society has in turn lionised the _marmiton_, or a.s.sistant-cook, self-styled an 'Emir of the Lebanon;' the Indian 'rajah,' at home a _munshi_, or language-master; and the 'African princess,' a slave-girl picked up in the bush. It is the same hunger for sensation which makes the mob stare at the Giant and the Savage, the Fat Lady, the Living Skeleton, and the Spotted Boy.

Before entering into details it will be necessary to notice the history of the colony--an oft-told tale; yet nevertheless some parts will bear repet.i.tion.

[Footnote: The following is its popular chronology:-- 1787. First settlers (numbering 460) sailed.

1789. Town burnt by natives (1790?).

1791. St. George's Bay Company founded.

1792. Colonists (1,831) from Nova Scotia.

1794. Colony plundered by the French.

1800. Maroons (560) from Jamaica added.

1808. Sa Leone ceded to the Crown; 'Cruits' introduced.

1827. Direct government by the Crown.]

According to Pere Labat, the French founded in 1365 Pet.i.t Paris at 'Serrelionne,' a town defended by the fort of the Dieppe and Rouen merchants. The official date of the discovery is 1480, when Pedro de Cintra, one of the gentlemen of Prince Henry 'the Navigator,' visited the place, after his employer's death A.D. 1463. In 1607 William Finch, merchant, found the names of divers Englishmen inscribed on the rocks, especially Thos. Candish, or Cavendish, Captain Lister, and Sir Francis Drake. In 1666 the Sieur Villault de Bellefons tells us that the river from Cabo Ledo, or Cape Sierra Leone, had several bays, of which the fourth, now St. George's, was called _Baie de France_. This seems to confirm Pere Labat. I have noticed the Ta.s.so fort, built by the English in 1695. The next account is by Mr. Surveyor Smith, [Footnote: He is mentioned in the last chapter.] who says 'it is not certain when the English became masters of Sierra Leone, which they possessed unmolested until Roberts the pirate took it in 1720.' Between 1785 and 1787 Lieutenant John Matthews, R.N., resided here, and left full particulars concerning the export slave-trade, apparently the only business carried on by the British.

Modern Sa Leone is the direct outcome of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's memorable decision delivered in the case of Jas. Somerset _v_. Mr. James G. Stewart, his master. 'The claim of slavery never can be supported; the power claimed never was in use here or acknowledged by law.' This took place on June 21, 1772; yet in 1882 the Gold Coast is not wholly free. [Footnote: Slavery was abolished on the Gold Coast by royal command on December 7, 1874; yet the _Gold Coast Times_ declares that domestic slavery is an inst.i.tution recognised by the law-courts of the Protectorate.]

Many 'poor blacks,' thrust out of doors by their quondam owners, flocked to the 'African's friend,' Granville Sharp, and company. Presently a charitable society, with a large command of funds and Jonas Hanway for chairman, was formed in London; and our people, sorely sorrowing for their newly-found sin, proposed a colony founded on philanthropy and free labour in Africa. Sa Leone was chosen, by the advice of Mr. Smeathman, an old resident. In 1787 Captain Thompson, agent of the St. George's Bay Company, paid 30_l_. to the Timni chief, Naimbana, _alias_ King Tom, for the rocky peninsula, extending twenty square miles from the Rokel to the Ketu River.

In the same year he took out the first batch of emigrants, 460 black freed-men and about 60 whites, in the ship _Nautilus_, whose history so far resembled that of the _Mayflower_. Eighty-four perished on the journey, and not a few fell victims to the African climate and its intemperance; but some 400 survived and built for themselves Granville Town. These settlers formed the first colony.

In 1790 the place was attacked by the Timni tribe, to avenge the insult offered to their 'King Jimmy' by the crew of an English vessel, who burnt his town. The people dispersed, and were collected from the bush with some difficulty by Mr. Falconbridge. This official was sent out from England early in 1791, and his wife wrote the book. In the same year (1791) St.

George's Bay Company was incorporated under Act 31 Geo. III. c. 55 as the 'Sierra Leone Company.' Amongst the body of ninety-nine proprietors the foremost names are Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, William Ludlam, and Sir Richard Carr Glynn. They spent 111,500_l_. in establishing and developing the settlement during the first ten and a half years of its existence; and the directors organised a system of government, closely resembling the British const.i.tution, under Lieutenant Clarkson, R.N.

Next year the second batch of colonists came upon the stage. The negroes who had remained loyal to England, and had been settled by the Government in Nova Scotia, found the bleak land utterly unsuitable, and sent home a delegate to pray that they might be restored to Africa. The directors obtained free pa.s.sage in sixteen ships for 100 white men and 1,831 negroes. Led by Lieutenant Clarkson, they landed upon the Lioness range in March (1792), after losing sixty of their number.

Bred upon maize and rice, bread and milk, the new comers sickened on ca.s.sava and ground-nuts. They had no frame-houses, and the rains set in early, about mid-May, before they had found shelter. The whites were attacked with climate-fever, which did not respect even the doctors.

Quarrels and insubordination resulted, and 800 of the little band were soon carried to the grave. Then a famine broke out. A ship from England, freighted with stores, provisions, and frame-houses, was driven back by a storm. Forty-five acres had been promised to each settler-family; it was found necessary to diminish the number to four, and the denseness of the bush rendered even those four unmanageable. Disgusted with Granville Town, the new comers transferred themselves to the present site of Freetown, the northern _Libreville_.

The Company offered annual premiums to encourage the building of farm-houses, stock-rearing, and growing provisions and exportable produce.

Under Dr. Afzelius, afterwards Professor at Upsal, who first studied the natural history of the peninsula, they established an experimental garden and model farm. An English gardener was also employed to naturalise the large collection of valuable plants from the East and West Indies and the South Sea Islands supplied by Kew. The Nova Scotians, however, like true slaves, considered agriculture servile and degrading work--a prejudice which, as will be seen, prevails to this day not only in the colony, but throughout the length and breadth of the Dark Continent.

Meanwhile war had broken out between England and France, causing the frequent detention of vessels; and a store-ship in the harbour caught fire, the precursor of a worse misfortune. On a Sunday morning, 1794, as the unfortunates were looking out for the Company's craft (the _Harpy_), a French man-of-war sailed into the roadstead, pillaged the 'church and the apothecary's shop,' and burnt boats as well as town. The a.s.sailant then wasted Granville, sailed up to Bance Island, and finally captured two vessels, besides the long-expected _Harpy_. Having thus left his mark, he disappeared, after granting, at the Governor's urgent request, two or three weeks' provision for the whites. Famine followed, with sickness in its train, and the neighbouring slave-dealers added all they could to the sufferings of the settlement.

In the same year Zachary Macaulay, father of Lord Macaulay, became Governor for the first time. The Company also made its earliest effort to open up trade with the interior by a mission, and two of their servants penetrated 300 miles inland to Timbo, capital of that part of Pulo-land. A deputation of chiefs presently visited the settlement to propose terms; but the futility of the negro settler was a complete obstacle to the development of the internal commerce, the main object for which the Company was formed. Yet the colony prospered; in 1798 Freetown numbered, besides public buildings, about 300 houses.

In 1800 the Sierra Leone Company obtained a Charter of Justice from the Crown, authorising the directors to appoint a Governor and Council, and to make laws not repugnant to those of England. During the same year the settlers, roused to wrath by a small ground-rent imposed upon their farms, rose in rebellion. This movement was put down by introducing a third element of 530 Maroons, who arrived in October. They were untamable Coromanti (Gold Coast) negroes who boasted that among blacks they were what the English are among whites, able to fight and thrash all other tribes. They had escaped from their Spanish masters when the British conquered Jamaica in 1655; they took to the mountains, and, joined by desperadoes, they built sundry scattered settlements. [Footnote: In 1738, after regular military operations, the Maroons of Jamaica agreed to act as police and to deliver up runaways. In 1795 the Trelawny men rebelled, and, having inflicted a severe loss upon the troops, were deported to Nova Scotia and Sa Leone.] Introducing these men fostered the ill-feeling which, in the earlier part of the present century, prevented the rival sections from intermarrying. Many of the disaffected Sa Leonites left the colony; some fled to the wilds and the wild ones of the interior, and a few remained loyal.

Rumours of native invasions began to prevail. The Governor was loth to believe that King Tom would thus injure his own interests, until one morning, when forty war-canoes, carrying armed Timnis, were descried paddling round the eastern point. Londoners and Nova Scotians fled to the fort, and next day the Timni drum sounded the attack. The Governor, who attempted to parley, was wounded; but the colonists, seeing that life was at stake, armed themselves and beat off the a.s.sailants, when the Maroons of Granville Town completed the rout. After this warning a wall with strong watch-towers was built round Freetown.

Notwithstanding all precautions, another 'Timni rising' took place in 1803. The a.s.sailants paddled down in larger numbers from Porto Loko, landed at Kissy, and a.s.saulted Freetown, headed by a jumping and drumming 'witch-woman.' Divided into three storming parties, they bravely attacked the gates, but they were beaten back without having killed a man. The dead savages lay so thick that the Governor, fearing pestilence, ordered the corpses to be cast into the sea.

The first law formally abolishing slavery was pa.s.sed, after a twenty years' campaign, by the energy of Messieurs Clarkson, Stephen, Wilberforce, and others, on May 23, 1806. In 1807 the importation of fresh negroes into the colonies became illegal. On March 16, 1808, Sa Leone received a const.i.tution, and was made a depot for released captives. This gave rise to the preventive squadron, and in due time to a large importation of the slaves it liberated. Locally called 'Cruits,' many of these savages were war-captives; others were criminals condemned to death, whom the wise chief preferred to sell than to slay. With a marvellous obtuseness and want of common sense our Government made Englishmen by wholesale of these wretches, with eligibility to sit on juries, to hold office, and to exercise all the precious rights of Englishmen. Instead of being apprenticed or bound to labour for some seven years under superintendence, and being taught to clear the soil, plant and build, as in similar cases a white man a.s.suredly would have been, they were allowed to loaf, lie, and cheat through a life equally harmful to themselves and others. 'Laws of labour,' says an African writer, [Footnote: _Sierra Leone Weekly Times_, July 30, 1862.] 'may be out of place (date?) in England, but in Sierra Leone they would have saved an entire population from trusting to the allurements of a petty, demoralising trade; they would have saved us the sight of decayed villages and a people becoming daily less capable of bearing the laborious toil of agricultural industry. To handle the hoe has now become a disgrace, and men have lost their manhood by becoming gentlemen.' I shall presently return to this subject.

Thus the four colonies which successively peopled Sa Leone were composed of dest.i.tute paupers from England, of fugitive Nova Scotian serviles, of outlawed Jamaican negroes, and of slave-prisoners or criminals from every region of Western and inner Africa.

The first society of philanthropists, the 'Sierra Leone Company,' failed, but not without dignity. It had organised a regular government, and even coined its own money. In the British Museum a silver piece like a florin bears on the obverse 'Sierra Leone Company, Africa,' surrounding a lion guardant standing on a mountain; the reverse shows between the two numbers 50 and 50 two joined hands, representing the union of England and Africa, and the rim bears 'half-dollar piece, 1791,' the year of the creation of the colony. The Company's intentions were pure; its hopes and expectations were lofty, and the enthusiasts flattered themselves that they had proved the practicability of civilising Africa. But debt and native wars ended their career, and transferred, on January 1, 1808, their rights to the Crown. The members, however, did not lose courage, but at once formed the African Inst.i.tution, the parent of the Royal Geographical Society.

The government of the Crown colony has undergone some slight modifications. In 1866 it was made, with very little forethought, a kind of government-general, the centre of rule for all the West African settlements. The unwisdom of this step was presently recognised, and Sa Leone is now under a charter dated December 17, 1874, the governor-in-chief having command over the administration of Bathurst, Gambia. Similarly farther south, Lagos, now the Liverpool of West Africa, has been bracketed, foolishly enough, with the Gold Coast.

The liberateds, called by the people 'Cruits,' and officially 'recaptives,' soon became an important factor. In 1811 they numbered 2,500 out of 4,500; and between June 1819 and January 1833 they totalled 27,167 hands. They are now represented by about seventeen chief, and two hundred minor, tribes. A hundred languages, according to Mr. Koelle, increased to a hundred and fifty by Bishop Vidal, and reduced to sixty by Mr. Griffith, are spoken in the streets of Freetown, a 'city' which in 1860 numbered 17,000 and now 22,000 souls. The inextricably mixed descendants of the liberateds may be a total of 35,430, more than half the sum of the original settlement, 53,862. Being mostly criminals, and _ergo_ more energetic spirits, they have been the most petted and patronised by colonial rule. There were governors who attempted to enforce our wise old regulations touching apprenticeship, still so much wanted in the merchant navy; but disgust, recall, or death always shortened their term of office.

Naturally enough, the 'Cruits' were fiercely hated by Colonists, Settlers, and Maroons. Mrs. Melville reports an elderly woman exclaiming, 'Well, 'tis only my wonder that we (settlers) do not rise up in one body and _kill_ and _slay_, _kill_ and _slay!_ Dem Spanish and Portuguese sailors were quite right in making slaves. I would do de same myself, suppose I were in dere place.' 'He is only a liberated!' is a favourite sneer at the new arrivals; so in the West Indies, by a curious irony of fate, 'w.i.l.l.yfoss n.i.g.g.e.r' is a term of abuse addressed to a Congo or Guinea 'recaptive.' But here all the tribes are bitterly hostile to one another, and all combine against the white man. After the fashion of the Gold Coast they have formed themselves into independent caucuses called 'companies,'

who set aside funds for their own advancement and for the ruin of their rivals.

The most powerful and influential races are two--the Aku and the Ibo. The Akus [Footnote: This is a nickname from the national salutation, 'Aku, ku, ku?' ('How d'ye do?')] or Egbas of Yoruba, the region behind Lagos, the Eyeos of the old writers, so called from their chief town, 'Oyo,' are known by their long necklaces of tattoo. They are termed the Jews of Western Africa; they are perfect in their combination, and they poison with a remarkable readiness. The system of Egba 'clanship' is a favourite, sometimes an engrossing, topic for invective with the local press, who characterise this worst species of 'trades-union,' founded upon intimidation and something worse, as the 'Aku tyranny' and the 'Aku Inquisition.' The national proverb speaks the national sentiment clearly enough: '_Okan kau le ase ibi, ikoko li asi molle bi atoju molle tau, ke atoju ibi pella, bi aba ku ara enni ni isni 'ni'_ ('A man must openly practise the duties of kinship, even though he may privately belong to a (secret) club; when he has attended the club he must also attend to the duties of kinship, because when he dies his kith and kin are those who bury him').

The Ibos, or 'Eboes' of American tales, are even more divided; still they feel and act upon the principle 'Union is strength.' This large and savage tribe, whose headquarters are at Abo, about the head of the Nigerian delta, musters strong at Sa Leone; here they are the Swiss of the community; the Kruboys, and further south the Kabenda-men being the 'Paddies.' It is popularly said that while the Aku will do anything for money, the Ibo will do anything for revenge. Both races are astute in the extreme and intelligent enough to work harm. Unhappily, their talents rarely take the other direction. In former days they had faction-fights: the second eastern district witnessed the last serious disturbance in 1834. Now they do battle under the shadow of the law. 'Aku constables will not, unless in extreme cases, take up their delinquent countrymen, nor will an Ebo constable apprehend an Ebo thief; and so on through all the different tribes,' says the lady 'Resident of Sierra Leone.' If the majority of the jury be Akus, they will unhesitatingly find the worst of Aku criminals innocent, and the most innocent of whites, Ibos, or Timnis guilty. The Government has done its best to weld all those races into one, and has failed. Many, however, are becoming Moslems, as at Lagos, and this change may have a happier effect by introducing the civilisation of El-Islam.

Trial by jury has proved the reverse of a blessing to most non-English lands; in Africa it is simply a curse. The model inst.i.tution becomes here, as in the United States, a better machine for tyranny than any tyrant, except a free people, ever invented. The British Const.i.tution determines that a man shall be tried by his peers. Half a dozen of his peers at Sa Leone may be full-blooded blacks, liberated slaves, half-reformed fetish-worshippers, sometimes with a sneaking fondness for Shango, the Egba G.o.d of fire; and, if not criminals and convicts in their own country, at best paupers clad in dishclouts and palm-oil. The excuse is that a white jury cannot be collected among the forty or fifty eligibles in Freetown. It is vain to 'challenge,' for other negroes will surely take the place of those objected to. No one raises the const.i.tutional question, 'Are these half-reclaimed savages my peers?' And if he did, Justice would sternly reply, 'Yes.' The witnesses will forswear themselves, not, like our 'posters,' for half a crown, but gratis, because the plaintiff or defendant is a fellow-tribesman. The judge may be 'touched with a tar-brush;' but, be he white as milk, he must pa.s.s judgment according to verdict. This state of things recalls to mind the Ireland of the early nineteenth century, when the judges were prefects armed with a penal code, and the jurymen vulgar, capricious, and factious partisans.

Surely such a caricature of justice, such an outrage upon reason, was never contemplated by British law or lawgiver. Our forefathers never dreamt that the free inst.i.tutions for which they fought and bled during long centuries would thus be prost.i.tuted, would be lavished upon every black 'recaptive,' be he thief, wizard, or a.s.sa.s.sin, after living some fourteen days in a black corner of the British empire. Even the Irishman and the German must pa.s.s some five years preparing themselves in the United States before they become citizens. Sensible Africans themselves own that 'the negro race is not fitted, without a guiding hand, to exercise the privileges of English citizenship.' A writer of the last century justly says, 'Ideas of perfect liberty have too soon been given to this people, considering their utter ignorance. If one of them were asked why he does not repair his house, clear his farm, mend his fence, or put on better clothes, he replies that "King no give him work dis time," and that he can do no more than "burn bush and plant little _ca.s.sader_ for yam."'

But a kind of _hysterica pa.s.sio_ seems to have mastered the cool common sense of the nation--a fury of repentance for the war about the Asiento contract, for building Bristol and Liverpool with the flesh and blood of the slave, and for the 2,130,000 negroes supplied to Jamaica between 1680 and 1786. Like a veteran devotee Great Britain began atoning for the coquetries of her hot youth. While Spain and Portugal have pa.s.sed sensible laws for gradual emanc.i.p.ation, England, with a sublime folly, set free by a stroke of the pen, at the expense of twenty millions sterling the born and bred slaves of Jamaica. The result was an orgy for a week, a systematic refusal to work, and for many years the ruin of the glorious island.

If the reader believes I have exaggerated the state of things long prevalent at Sa Leone, he is mistaken. And he will presently see a confirmation of these statements in the bad name which the Sa Leonite bears upon the whole of the western coast. Yet, I repeat, the colony is changed for the better, physically by a supply of pure water, morally by the courage which curbed the black abuse. Twenty years ago to call a negro 'n.i.g.g.e.r' was actionable; many a 5_l._ has been paid for the indulgence of _lese-majeste_ against the 'man and brother;' and not a few 50_l._ when the case was brought into the civil courts. After a rough word the Sa Leonite would shake his fist at you and trot off exclaiming, 'Lawyer Rainy (or Montague) lib for town!' A case of mild a.s.sault, which in England would be settled by a police-magistrate and a fine of five shillings, became at Freetown a serious 'bob.' Niger, accompanied by his friends or his 'company,' betook himself to some limb of the law, possibly a pettifogger, certainly a pauper who braved a deadly climate for uncertain lucre. His interest was to promote litigation and to fill his pockets by what is called sharp practice. After receiving the preliminary fee of _5l_., to be paid out of the plunder, he demanded exemplary damages, and the defendant was lightened of all he could afford to pay. When the offender was likely to leave the station, the _modus operandi_ was as follows. The writ of summons was issued. The lawyer strongly recommended an apology and a promise to defray costs, with the warning that judgment would go by default against the absentee. If the defendant prudently 'stumped up,' the affair ended; if not, a _capias_ was taken out, and the law ran its course. A jury was chosen, and I have already told the results.

At length these vindictive cases became so numerous and so scandalous that strong measures became necessary. Governor Blackall (1862-66) was brave enough to issue an order that cases should not be brought into the civil courts unless complainants could prove that they were men of some substance. Immense indignation was the result; yet the measure has proved most beneficial. The negro no longer squares up to you in the suburbs and dares the 'white n.i.g.g.ah' to strike the 'black gen'leman.' He mostly limits himself to a mild impudence. If you ask a well-dressed black the way to a house, he may still reply, 'I wonder you dar 'peak me without making compliment!' The true remedy, however, is still wanting, a 'court of summary jurisdiction presided over by men of honour and probity.'

[Footnote: _Wanderings in West Africa_, ii. pp. 231-23.]

It cannot be said that the Sa Leonite has suffered from any want of religious teaching or educational activity. On the contrary, he has had too much of both.

After the collapse of Portuguese missionary enterprise on the West Coast, the first attempts to establish Wesleyan Methodism at Sa Leone were made in 1796, when Dr. Thomas c.o.ke tried and failed. The Nova Scotian colonists in 1792 had already brought amongst them Wesleyans, Baptists, and Lady Huntingdon's connexion. This school, which differs from other Methodists only in Church government, still has a chapel at Sa Leone. Thus each sect claims 1792 as the era of its commencement in the colony. In 1811 Mr.

Warren, the first ordained Wesleyan missionary, reached Freetown and died on July 23, 1812. He was followed by Mrs. Davies, the prima donna of the corps: she 'gathered up her feet,' as the native saying is, on December 15, 1815. Since that time the place has never lacked an unbroken succession of European missionary deaths.

The Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, sent out, five years afterwards, its first representatives, MM. Renner and Hartwig, Germans supported by English funds. In 1816 they devoted themselves steadily to converting the 'recaptives,' and many of them, together with their wives, fell bravely at their posts. In twenty years thirty-seven out of seventy died or were invalided. The names of Wylander and W. A. B. Johnson are deservedly remembered. Nearly half a million sterling was spent at Sa Leone, where the stone church of Kissy Road was built in 1839, and that of Pademba Road in 1849. The grants were wisely withdrawn in 1862. At the present moment only 300_l_. is given, and the church is reported to be self-supporting. The first bishopric was established in 1852. In 1861 Bishop Beckles inst.i.tuted the native Church pastorate: its const.i.tution is identical with that of the Episcopalians, whose ecclesiastical functions it has taken over.

According to the last census-returns, Sa Leone contains 18,660 Episcopalians; 17,093 Wesleyans and Methodists of the New Connection; 2,717 Lady Huntingdonians; 388 Baptists, and 369 Catholics. These native Christians keep the Sundays and Church festivals with peculiar zest, and delight in discordant hymns and preaching of the most ferocious kind. The Dissenting chapel combines the Christy minstrel with Messieurs Moody and Sankey; and the well-peppered palaver-sauce of home cookery reappears in hotly spiced, bitterly pious sermons and 'experiences;' in shouts of 'Amen!' 'Glory!' and 'Hallelujah!' and in promiscuous orders to 'Hol' de fort.' Right well do I remember while the rival pilots, Messieurs Elliot and Johnson, were shamelessly perjuring themselves in the police-court, [Footnote: _Wanderings in West Africa_, i. pp. 256-58.] the junior generation on the other side of the building, separated by the thinnest of party-walls, was refreshing itself with psalms and spiritual songs.

We went to hear the psalmody. Ascending the staircase in the gable opposite the court-house, we pa.s.sed down the hall, and saw through the open door the young idea at its mental drill in the hands of a pedagogue, apparently one of the [Greek: _anaimosarka_], who, ghastly white and thatched with Paganini hair, sat at the head of the room, the ruling body of the unruly rout. Down the long length, whose whitewashed walls were garnished with inscriptions, legal, moral, and religious, all sublime as far as size went, were ranged parallel rows of _negrillons_ in the vast costumal variety of a ragged school. They stood bolt upright, square to the fore, in the position of ' 'tention,' their naked toes disposed at an angle of 60, with fingers close to the seams of their breeches (when not breekless), heads up and eyes front. Face and body were motionless, as if cast in ebony: nothing moved but the saucer-like white eyes and the ivory-lined mouths, from whose ample lips and gape issued a prodigious volume of sound. Native a.s.sistants, in sable skins and yellowish white chokers, carrying music-scores and armed with canes, sloped through the avenues, occasionally halting to frown down some delinquent, whose body was not perfectly motionless, and whose soul was not wholly fixed upon the development of sacred time and tune. I have no doubt that they sang--

The sun, the moon, and all the stars, &c.

precisely in the same spirit as if they had been intoning--

Peter Hill! poor soul!

Flog 'um wife, oh no! oh no!

and that famous anthropological a.s.sertion--

Eve ate de appel, Gib one to daddy Adam; And so came mi-se-ry Up-on dis worl'.