It was on the 1st of July that he found himself able to write a few lines to acquaint his friends at Sierra Leone with his arrival at Falaba, and that he hoped soon to be able to go even farther eastward; two natives of Soolima volunteering to be the bearers of his despatches. On the 11th, he was so well as to mount on horseback and take a survey of the adjacent country, but from the delay occasioned by the unwillingness of the king to allow him to depart, it was not till the 17th of September that he finally quitted Falaba in order to return to Sierra Leone; having resided in the Soolima country more than three months. He was on the 9th of September gratified by the return of the messengers he had sent to Sierra Leone; he received the packet they conveyed to him with exquisite delight; but besides the kind letters of his friends, they sent “tobacco, sugar, a little brandy, which soon disappeared among the Soolimas, and, though last not least, two pairs of good shoes, a luxury to which his feet had for some time been unaccustomed. He was also furnished, through the kindness of Dr. Barry, staff-surgeon at Sierra Leone, with a lancet and two glass plates of preserved vaccine virus, with which, on the 13th, he was permitted to inoculate a number of children, commencing with those of the king himself,” who had so much confidence in him, that Laing says “he believed he would have permitted him to have attempted the most extravagant experiment upon any of his own family.” If he had possessed sufficient virus, he continues, “I might have inoculated all the children in Falaba: the yard was absolutely crowded with old men and women, holding young children in their arms, and forming a group worthy of the pencil of a West or a Rubens.” He very naturally remarks upon it as an interesting fact, “that a nation so far in the interior of Africa, should have so readily submitted, at the instigation of a white man, who was almost a stranger to them, to an operation against which so much prejudice existed for so many years in the most enlightened and civilized countries in Europe. When the general prevalence of superstitious fear from greegrees and fetishes is duly considered, this fact presents a strong proof of the confidence which the natives of Western Africa repose in the measures of white people to benefit them; and affords a no less strong presumption, that their other superstitious notions might soon be found to give way, in like manner, to the labours of the missionary: and their present barbarous habits of obtaining slaves for trade by force of arms, to the more rational proceeding of cultivating the soil for articles of commercial exchange.”