The interior is improving. Captain Winniet visited Ashantee in October, 1849. He found on the route large thriving additional villages, as far as English protection extended. He was received at Kumassi with the usual display of African music, musketry, and marching. He was led for a mile and a half through a lane at heads and shoulders, clustered thick on both sides. There were here and there diverging branches of a like character, as thick with heads and shoulders; and at the end of each, a chief sitting in his chair of state. To and by each chief, a hand was waved as a salutation, until the monarch himself was reached. He rose, came forward, and, with heavy lumps of gold dangling at his wrists, exhibited his agility in dancing. When this act of state ceremony had been properly _done up_, he offered his hand to shake, and thus completed the etiquette of a reception at court. The houses, with piazzas projecting to shelter them from the sun--public-rooms in front, and dwelling-rooms behind, nicely plastered and colored--were greatly admired. The pleading about the slave-trade was the main business and the main difficulty; but the nature of such negotiations appears, in its most impressive aspect, in the case of Dahomey. This chief professes great devotedness to England. In consequence of some difficulty, he gave notice to European foreigners, “that he was not much accustomed to cut off white heads, but if any interfered with an agent of the English government, he would cut off their heads as readily as those of his black people.” By murderous incursions against his neighbors, he seized about nine thousand victims annually. He sold about three thousand of these directly on his own account, gave the rest chiefly away to his troops, who sold them: a duty of five dollars being paid on each slave exported, afforded him altogether a revenue of about three hundred thousand dollars.