“’Scuse me, Mr. Englefield,” said Annan, “dis man have some business to talk wid me.” He motioned to the Fulah to take a seat beside him on the gin cases, and when his guest had seated himself--drawing up his legs and squatting tailor-wise--he fished out from his pocket a fresh kola-nut and presented it to his client as a preliminary to business. The Fulah accepted the gift with a gracious nod and drew out a small dagger, with which he cut off a piece of the nut; then pulling his face-cloth down below his chin, popped the piece of kola into his mouth and began to chew solemnly. The preliminary arrangements being thus complete, Annan opened the negotiations with a voluble address in the Hausa language. I had not intended to play the part of eavesdropper, but in the first sentence I caught the words “Fatunan birare” (monkey skins), and surmising that I had before me one of those native hunters who “live for far bush and never come for dis country,” I grinned silently and pricked up my ears. And as I listened and watched the Fulah merchant solemnly munching his kola and spitting out the orange-red juice upon the ground before him, there were one or two things that caused me no little surprise. In the first place there was the man himself, the very antithesis of one’s conception of an African; gravely self-possessed, quiet of speech, taciturn yet courteous and suave, with his long oval face, his thin aquiline nose, his delicate mouth, his olive skin--several shades fairer than my own sun-tanned hide--his black eyes, full of passion and sadness, he might have sat for a portrait of Dante or Savonarola, so ascetic and lofty did he seem beside the monkey-faced, jabbering Annan. Then there was his speech. I have mentioned that in listening to the talk of the Hausa soldiers, I found it difficult to follow them, that their accent and pronunciation were widely different from that given by Schön and Barth in their vocabularies of the Hausa language; and I had naturally thought that the traveller and missionary were at fault. But as I listened to this man with his clear-cut European-like accent, never confusing the _l_ sounds with the _r_, as the others did, I realised that what I had heard hitherto was but a debased _patois_, and that this was the real Hausa language. But more than this. I was astonished to find how much progress I had made with the language, for now, when for the first time I heard it properly spoken, I was able to follow it with hardly a failure, although I could scarcely make out a word of Annan’s jabber. Indeed, I felt confident that I could have conversed quite fluently with this stranger; but I refrained from the experiment, remembering my resolution to keep my knowledge of the language to myself for the present.