I sat down upon the spreading roots of a baobab that stood by the wayside with its squat colossal trunk, like some weird Hamadryad, grown elderly and stout, and with the open locket in my hand, fell into a brown study. Straightway the present vanished and was forgotten. The bare and dismal orchard land with its meandering trail; the vultures wheeling in the blue, the stealthy antelope, the brown baboons, watchful and inquisitive, and the hollow-voiced secret cuckoo: all faded out of my consciousness, and I looked upon a flat sea-shore where the surf fretted upon shining, pearl-tinted sands; I heard the ripple of girlish laughter mingle with the murmur of the sea; I felt again that gracious presence that had stolen into my lonely life and filled it with beauty and romance. Often in the strenuous, eventful life of the last few months had my thoughts turned to that quiet house by the lagoon, that held all that I really loved in the world; but I had rarely been alone, and my harassing circumstances had left me little opportunity for reflection, so that this vivid message, coming as it were direct from another world, gave substance and reality to what had begun to appear but a dream. “Here he is! I have found him! What? Art thou meditating and seeing visions again?” It was the voice of Aminé, and it jarred on me like the jangling of discordant bells. Back in an instant I was dragged from my reverie of peace and love into this hurly-burly of savagery, with its sordid unrestfulness; back from the sweet domestic calm to the clamour of barbarism. I hastily closed the locket and secreted it, and dropping the open leather case through the neck hole of my _riga_, stood up. “We heard thou hadst taken this road,” said Dan-jiwa, who had accompanied Aminé as bodyguard, “and so came to meet thee. Musa is roasting a sheep that we may rejoice at thy return.” I turned and sauntered regretfully towards the town, still thoughtful and abstracted; but as we entered the street Aminé stole up and shyly took my hand. “Thou hast not looked at my new _túrkedi_ or my _zenné_,” she said plaintively. I stopped, deeply ashamed of my unsympathetic egotism, and looked at the girl. She was indeed transformed. In her dark blue _túrkedi_ with the darker blue silken _zenné_ dropped hoodwise over her head, the scarlet beads upon her shapely neck, and the dark line drawn under her eye-lashes with the stibium-rod, she made a most striking figure, and might have been some princess of the house of Judah. It was not the most auspicious moment to have chosen in which to bespeak my admiration, but I told her that she looked fit to be the wife of the Sultan of Sokoto, and this seemed to give her pleasure. “I want no Sultan for my husband, if I have thee,” she said simply, at which Dan-jiwa patted her on the shoulder approvingly, saying-- “Thou art right, Aminé, and art a wise girl not to leave it to other women to find out thy husband’s merits.”