“Whisht!” whistled Moloney as he whirled the lead round. “Will ye take that black chuckle-head of yourn out of the road before ye get it knocked off;” then as the lead plumped into the water and he gathered up the slack of the line, he sang out in his mellow Irish baritone: “By the deep--eight.” Six weeks of unvaried sea and sky makes the sight of any land welcome, and so we all gazed shoreward with a feeling of pleasure, although we looked upon nothing more than the ill-omened coast of the Bight of Benin. And an agreeable enough picture it made, with the deep blue sky, the bright yellow streak of beach lace-edged with a white fringe of surf, and the low-lying land covered with dense soft-looking foliage of dark bluish green. “That’s Jellah-Coffee that we’re passing now,” said the Captain, pointing to what looked like a large park or wood, “all cocoa nuts, thousands of palms--we ought to get some copra from there.” “How far is Quittáh from here?” I asked. “There it is,” he replied, pointing to another grove of vegetation a mile or so further east; “we shall open the fort in a few minutes.” We continued to approach the land obliquely, guided by Moloney’s probings of the deep and taking in sail by degrees, until the veil of foliage rolling aside disclosed a white building of some size, above which I made out with my glasses the Union Jack fluttering from a tall flagstaff. At this moment Moloney sang out, with some emphasis, as I thought, “Quarter less--six,” on which the brig’s head was put up into the wind and the anchor chain rattled out through the hawse-pipe for the first time since we sailed out of Ramsgate harbour. That afternoon, as the Captain had to go ashore to transact some business with the District Commissioner, relating to the duties on our part of the cargo, he proposed that I should accompany him that I might see some of the sights of Quittáh and make the acquaintance of Pereira. To this I readily agreed, and soon after lunch the skipper and I took our seats in a couple of Madeira chairs that were lashed to the thwarts of a surf-boat that Pereira had sent out for us in charge of his coloured agent, a dark mulatto named Isaac Vanderpuye. By Vanderpuye we were assured that the surf was as quiet as a lamb to-day, which gave me the impression that the African lamb must be a beast of an exceedingly boisterous temperament, for after being most infernally buffeted and shaken up by the heavy swell we were finally shot out on the beach drenched to the skin with salt water.