In fact there was a sort of a half track leading off near the bank, through among the long coarse grass and the ferny sprouts of young cocoas, and a wide stretch of open country seen beyond it, dotted all over with low clumps of trees and bush rounded off in the gush of light, that gave it all a straw-coloured tint up to where a bare reddish-looking ridge of hill looked over a long swell of wild forest, off a hot, pale, cloudless sky. Here and there you saw the shadow of one bluff lying purple on the side of another, and a faint blue peak between, letting north'ard into some pass through the hills, but no signs of life save a few dun big-headed buffaloes feeding about a swampy spot not very far off, and rather too shaggy, by all appearance, to make pleasant company. Accordingly, we held for a few yards under the shade, where the fat mid, thinking to show off his knowingness by getting cocoa-nuts for the ladies, began to shy balls of mud from the creek-side at the monkeys in the trees. However, he brought us rather more than he bargained for, till the whole blessed jungle seemed to be gathering between us and the boat to pelt us to death with nuts as big as eighteen-pound shot, husks and all; so off we had to hurry into the glare again, Sir Charles half carrying his daughter through guinea-grass up to the waist--when somebody felt the smell of smoke, and next minute we broke out near it, wreathing up white from inside a high bamboo fence, propped up and tied all along with cocoa-nut husk. "What the devil!" shouted the foremost cadet, as soon as he found the opening, "they're cannibals!--roasting a black child, by heaven!" and in he dashed, being no chicken of a fellow _ashore_ at any rate, the others after him, while the Judge, Simm, and I, kept outside with the ladies, who were all of a shudder, of course, what with the thought, and what with the queer scent of roast meat that came to us. "Ha, ha!" laughed the cadet next moment, "it's only a monkey, after all!--come in, though, Sir Charles, if you please, sir,--nobody here, ladies." There, accordingly, was the little skinned object twirling slowly between two bamboo sticks, over a fire beneath two or three immense green leaves on a frame, with its knees up not to let its legs burn; about a dozen half-open sheds and huts, like little corn-stacks, thatched close with reeds, and hung with wattled mats of split bamboo, giving the place more the look of a farmyard than a village; as there was a big tree spreading in the middle, a few plantains, yams, and long maize-stalks flowering out of the coarse guinea-grass which the niggers hadn't taken the trouble to tread down all round inside of the fence. However, we weren't long of perceiving an old gray-headed black sitting on his hams against the post of a hut, watching us all the time; and a villanously ugly old thief he looked, with a string of Aggry beads about his head, and a greegree charm-bag hung round his shrivelled