I stood up and looked over the wall. Two natives were coming towards us along the path, one an aged woman, white-haired, lean and shrivelled, and the other a middle-aged man who held the woman’s hand with one of his and with the other grasped a long staff with which he tapped upon the ground before him as he walked. There was nothing remarkable in the appearance of the old woman, excepting the fan-like group of radiating scars on her temples which showed that she belonged to the Krepi tribe. But the aspect of the man was most horrible. His body was to the last degree emaciated; his face was so seamed and disfigured with scars as to be hardly human; his neck was covered with a pattern of warty button-like scars; his ears had been carved out into scallops like a cock’s comb, and his empty eye-sockets were so sunken that his face was like that of a dry skull. As the pair came up to where we were standing, Pereira addressed them in the Efé language, and I gathered that he was inquiring after the man’s health; but although his manner was kind and sympathetic enough, his questions were received with sullen reserve, and after a very brief conversation, the old woman put an end to the interview by abruptly seizing the man’s arm and hurrying him away. Pereira looked after them with a puzzled expression on his face, as the old woman strode along and the man, with chin stuck forward and his stick groping before him, stumbled by her side. “There goes another African mystery,” my friend remarked turning to me. “How so?” I asked. “What did the old lady say?” “Oh, she said,” replied Pereira, “that she had brought her son all the way from Peki to see the white doctor at Quittáh.” “Well, he does certainly look a trifle off colour,” I remarked. “Did the old woman say how he lost his eyes?” “Ah! that was the question that gave so much offence. Her explanation was that he had some kind of sickness as a child, but she was not inclined to be confidential, as you saw.” “No, indeed. But I suppose there is a good deal of eye disease here as in other tropical countries?” “Oh, certainly there is; but I suspect that the disease that cost him his sight was somehow connected with a flat iron rod with a hook at the end.” “Good God!” I exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say that you think his eyes have been put out?” “That is my belief,” answered Pereira. “Didn’t you notice his eye-sockets with never a vestige of eyeball left? And did you see his ears and his neck? Those were no tribal marks. That man has been an Ashanti ‘donkor’ or alien slave. I remember once before meeting a blind man--also a Krepi--with just the same appearance and marked in the same manner, and he was just as reticent as this one; and he, I learned for certain, had been one of the King’s slaves in Ashanti, but I never could find out anything more about him.” “And he had had _his_ eyes put out?” “Evidently, although he told the same story of illness in childhood as this one.”