The Timni district is a chief centre of the so-called _porro_ fraternity[150], a sort of secret society or freemasonry widely diffused throughout the coastlands, and possessing its own symbols, skin markings, passwords, and language. It presents curious points of analogy with the brotherhoods of the Micronesian islanders, but appears to be even more potent for good and evil, a veritable religious and political state within the state. "When their mandates are issued all wars and civil strife must cease, a general truce is established, and bloodshed stopped, offending communities being punished by bands of armed men in masks. Strangers cannot enter the country unless escorted by a member of the guild, who is recognised by passwords, symbolic gestures, and the like. Their secret rites are celebrated at night in the depths of the forest, all intruders being put to death or sold as slaves[151]." In studying the social conditions prevalent amongst the Sierra Leonese proper, it should be remembered that they are sprung, not only from representatives of almost every tribe along the seaboard, and even in the far interior, but also to a large extent from the freedmen and runaways of Nova Scotia and London, besides many maroons of Jamaica, who were settled here under the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company towards the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. Others also have in recent years been attracted to the settlements from the Timni and other tribes of the neighbouring districts. The Sierra Leonese are consequently not themselves a tribe, nor yet a people, but rather a people in course of formation under the influence of a new environment and of a higher culture. An immediate consequence of such a sudden aggregation of discordant elements was the loss of all the native tongues, and the substitution of English as the common medium of intercourse. But English is the language of a people standing on the very highest plane of culture, and could not therefore be properly assimilated by the _disjecta membra_ of tribes at the lowest rung of the social ladder. The resultant form of speech may be called ludicrous, so ludicrous that the Sierra Leonese version of the New Testament had to be withdrawn from circulation as verging almost on the blasphemous[152].