“Have ye now?” exclaimed Bithery, jumping up and seizing my hand. “I am delighted to hear you say so, for if you will take charge of the stuff ashore, I shall be relieved of a great responsibility. You see, old man, there’s nobody else on board that I could trust with the goods and the money, and of course I know nothing about any of these shore chaps; so I take this as really kind of you. I’ll tell Pereira that you’re going to stay with him, shall I?” “By all means,” I replied, with another complacent glance round the airy, comfortable room; “that is, if he is willing to put me up.” “Oh, he’ll be willing enough,” rejoined the Captain, and Pereira returning at this moment, the arrangement was completed out of hand, much to the old gentleman’s apparent satisfaction. That night I slept but little, for a variety of causes kept me restless and wakeful. In the first place the large square bed, which was enclosed in a mosquito curtain that flapped and rustled in the wind, had an irritating way of keeping perfectly level and stationary--a state of things that now seemed quite abnormal and surprising. Then the night air was filled with new and unfamiliar sounds. Instead of the rhythmical creaking of a wooden ship, the song of the breeze among sails and rigging, the squeal of parrel or sheave, and the grinding of the rudder, the stillness was broken into by the “churr” of countless insects, the monotonous whistle of a large bat, the muffled boom of the surf, and the shrill falsetto of a native dog. And, lastly, my mind was in a whirl with the thoughts and speculations concerning the new phase of life to which the morrow was to introduce me and which I was indeed still turning over when the bugle from the Hausa lines announced the coming of the day, and the dawn began to filter in between the jalousies of my window. CHAPTER III. I HEAR STRANGE STORIES AND VAGUE RUMOURS. Of the details of my life during the time that I remained in charge of the store it is not my intention to speak, for, although every day brought with it some new incident which interested me then as it does now to recall, yet few of the events of my busy and laborious life had any relation to those subsequent adventures and strange occurrences which it is the purpose of this narrative to describe. I shall therefore content myself by giving a brief account of my manner of life at Quittáh, and of the one or two events that determined my subsequent destiny. When I first took charge of the store, being ignorant alike of all the native languages and of the value of both the trade goods that I sold and the produce that I was to buy, the Captain secured for me the assistance of Vanderpuye, who, although a Fanti by birth, had been settled many years in Quittáh. But in a week I was able to manage the business alone, or, at least, with the aid of one native assistant only.