I find in them a peculiar individuality and likeness to humankind. There
is the chubby babe, six feet high; the fast-growing 'hobbedehoy;' the
adult, bending away from you like a man, or, woman-like, inclining towards
you; there is the bald, shrunken senior; and, lastly, appears death, lean
and cold and dry.

Between sea and settlement stand the canoes, flat-bottomed and tip-tilted
like Turkish slippers; where the land is low and floods are high, each is
mounted upon four posts. Fronting and outside the village stands a
wall-less roof of flat matting, the palaver-house. The settlement is
surrounded by a palisade of fronds stripped from the bamboo-palm and
strengthened by posts; the latter put forth green shoots as soon as stuck
in the ground, and recall memories of Robinson Crusoe. The general
entrance has a threshold two to two and a half feet high. The tenements
are simple as birds' nests, primitive as the Highlander's mud-cabin and
shieling of wattle and heather. The outer walls are of bamboo-palm fronds,
the partitions are of bamboo-palm matting, and the roofs are of
bamboo-palm thatch. Each place has its _osafahin_, or headman, and each
headman has his guest-house, built of better material, swish or adobe.

The only approach to grandeur are the long surges and white combers of the
mournful and misty Atlantic. They roll like the waving prairie-land, curl
their huge heads, and dash down in a fury of foam. 'On the top of a billow
we ride,' with a witness. Here and there black dots peer through the surf,
and to touch them is death. This foul shore presents a formidable barrier
to landing: there absolutely is no safe place between Apollonia and the
Ancobra. European employés avoid tempting the breakers; they disembark and
re-embark for home, and that is all. Mr. Grant assures us that there is no
risk; Mr. Grillett, who has worked the coast since 1875, says the
contrary; no man knows it better or fears it more. Some places are worse