’Nor do I, sir, but they seem jolly pleased.’ I found de Costa and his blooming Provisional Government—they were all bows and scrapes and hand-spreading. ’I want to know how you had the confounded impertinence to fire over my ship?’ was what I said to the little Secretary. I don’t know what he repeated, and for a minute there was terrible consternation among them. They all—theoretically—grovelled in the dust before me. But then they began to smile. ’His Excellency the Presidente will take you to see ze two gons,’ the Secretary told me, and I think there was a twinkle in his eye. He did take us, I, de Costa, and his Secretary driving solemnly in one carriage, Perkins and the rest of the Provisional Government crowding into another. We rattled through the lanes, along which Gerald Wilson had driven me, and stopped on top of the ridge. Here we got out, and had to tramp along it. ’You will see a sur-prise,’ the Secretary bowed—I’m certain that now there was a twinkle in his eye. We tramped along for a hundred yards or so, turned round a bit of a cocoa plantation, and there, behind a slope, was the first gun, and sitting on the top of one wheel was Bob Temple, and on the other, young Sparks—the ’Angel’ they called him—both as black as my hat, swilling kola bitters,[#] whilst my young clerk, Marchant, with his hand bound up in a blood-stained handkerchief, and half-a-dozen other mids. were lying on the slope, most of them doing the same. Twenty or more ragamuffins were standing by with baskets full of more bottles of kola, and trays of pastry, and the ground was littered with empty brass cylinder cases. [#] Kola bitters is a sweetish pink aerated water. So it was they who’d fired over the _Hector_, was it! and I wished to goodness that I could look impressive and angry when I wanted to. They’d sprung to attention when they saw me, and the only thing I could say was, ’Tut! tut! disgraceful!—go on board at once—your leave’s stopped for ever—tut! tut!’ and as they picked up their coats and obeyed me, I stalked away to the other gun, fifty yards farther along. Well, the rest of my beauties were there, but I’d had time to fix my eyeglass, and had worked up a fierce glare—I can glare much more successfully behind an eyeglass. Mr. Bostock, my Gunner, was with them, too, in plain clothes, looking very sheepish, and trying to put one foot on the ground between two brass cylinders which would roll together. ’You ought to have known better, Mr. Bostock,’ I said. ’Beg you pardon, sir,’ he muttered humbly, ’but it was like this. I ’appened to stroll up ’ere, arter the firing began—just to ’ave a look, sir—and I sees the young gen’l’men ’aving a bit of a spree.’ ’And you helped them—you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ ’Well, sir, it was like this, sir, I didn’t want the young gen’l’men to disgrace ’emselves in front of all this kittle cattle, so I just stays ’ere, sir, to see they do the drill proper, sir.’