edified by a select few instances of personal adventure and mishap that have occurred to sundry of the brave men whose records have assisted the compilation of this work. Let Mr. Hutchinson speak first as to the delights of a night’s lodging in Brass, a Western African town, as the reader will recollect, of unenviable celebrity: “King Keya meets us in the street and offers an invitation to his country house to spend the night there; as evening is approaching we accept his hospitality and forthwith proceed to the royal suburban residence. “If I were not alive now, and conscious of writing this in the cabin of H.M.S. V----, I could not believe that I ever should have been fortunate enough to enjoy such an uninterrupted continuation of delights as those experienced during that night’s stay in the royal abode at Brass. “My bedroom was about twelve feet by four, with holes in the bamboo roof about eight feet high that let the rain and rats come in, and holes in the floor, probably to allow both to make their exit. There was neither stool, chair, nor table, nor any article of furniture except the bed. This was made of two empty gun chests, covered with a native country mat, and having no pillow save a log of wood. The creek by which we voyaged up was within five yards of the door, and when the tide was low bull frogs, crocodiles, and mud fish could gambol about in their native parterre in the remorseless swamp, on which a human being trying to walk would certainly be swallowed up. The odour from this place at the time of our visit was indescribable, and the sensation that it brought to my olfactory nerves was far from being like that of the south wind breathing o’er a bed of violets, stealing, and giving odour. “As soon as I had seated myself on the bed (?), with a cigar in my mouth (for to sleep with all those accessories would have been a vain attempt), and had blown out my palm-oil lamp, down came the mosquitoes in showers, followed by some rats, which descended after them without waiting for an invitation. A few of the latter fell near to where I was sitting, and I made a furious tilt at them with a stick I had placed near me. This of course alarmed them and made them beat a retreat for some time. But as if in mockery of my chivalry within doors, outside the bull frogs commenced croaking in dozens, communicating as agreeable a sensation by their music as a rasping of a file over a rusty saw. I lay down and tried to sleep, but it was no use. In a few moments the rats were again gambolling on the roof. A slight shuffling movement which I heard on the floor made me fearful that at any minute I might be rendered conscious of something slimy in contact with my hand or face, probably a mud fish (or jump fish, as it is called by Kroomen), a kind of amphibious reptile that appears like a cross-breed between a conger-eel and a chameleon. How stupid I was to have blown out my light.