He was a man of some substance, and as he came day after day to purchase goods for the markets of the interior, I used to have a mat spread for him in the store, on which he would sit and make his purchases in the leisurely, chaffering manner so characteristic of the native trader. But it was impossible to keep his attention fixed on business matters, for, being a perfectly indefatigable talker and having apparently had many strange adventures, he used to collect quite a considerable audience of his countrymen from the Fort and the lines to listen to his spirited narrations. While he was discoursing in this manner I would often, if I had leisure, lounge hard by and listen, trying to follow the conversation but never succeeding, for, not only was my acquaintance with the language insufficient, but, as I presently discovered, neither Amádu nor the soldiers pronounced the words as they were spelt in my books. But although unable to make out the matter of Amádu’s discourse, I succeeded in picking out one or two phrases, which, as they often recurred and were received by the listeners with a great show of surprise, I conjectured to be an important part of the merchant’s story. One of these phrases was “Matári ’n seliki” or “King’s treasure house”; another was “Makáfi dayáwa,” “a number of blind men.” When I had with some difficulty translated these phrases and committed to memory some detached words which seemed to be the names of places--such as Diádasu, Tánosu, Insúta, and Kumási--I had learned all that I was destined to learn of Amádu’s story, for my assistant, Daniel Kudjo, spoke not a word of Hausa, and few of the Hausas spoke more than half a dozen words of English; and thus my curiosity, which had been strongly aroused by these mysterious phrases, had to remain unsatisfied. But a curious light was thrown on the subject by Pereira in the course of a conversation that I had with him one evening. It was my invariable custom at this time, on returning home from the store, heated and fatigued with the endless weighing of rubber, kernels and copra, and measuring of countless demijohns of palm oil in the glaring compound, or rummaging amongst the bales and cases in the store, to spend the long evenings, after my bath and dinner, lolling in a great chair, pipe in mouth, while the old gentleman reclined in a hammock and entertained me with his reminiscences of life in West Africa. We were talking on this occasion about the Ashanti war, then just concluded, and were discussing the indemnity of sixty thousand ounces of gold claimed by the British Government. “It seems an enormous sum,” I remarked. “Nearly two hundred and forty thousand pounds. One would not expect the king of a barbarous tribe like the Ashantis to possess such a reserve of wealth as that.”