We wandered down several narrow lanes between high fences of palm leaf and reeds, until, presently, Aba halted and, separating two of the mats forming the fence, we entered his compound. The twilight had already faded into night, and I could but dimly make out the beehive-shaped houses ranged round the enclosure or the shadowy forms flitting about in the darkness, but I could see that the compound was an open space some twenty yards square. In the centre of it a dull red fire was burning, and an aged man in a turban and riga squatted by it on a mat and occasionally stirred it with a stick. The special object of his regard, however, was not the fire itself but a singular little fence that encircled it, which fence I found, on nearer inspection, to consist of a number of pointed sticks stuck in the earth, each stick having impaled on it several pieces of meat with a lump of fat as a crowning ornament. Aba leaned over the fence and sniffed. “You fit chop dis sort, sah?” he asked. I replied with a most emphatic affirmative, for my mouth fairly watered at the delicious odour of the roasting meat; so Aba fetched a mat from his house and laid it down before the fire, and we squatted on it together and watched the meat roasting. Aba endeavoured to divert me with conversation until the meat should be ready, but the time seemed endless, and I found my famished gaze continually wandering towards the kabobs and noting the lumps of fat frizzling in the heat, and the little streams of oil that trickled over the meat and dripped upon the ground. And the way in which the old man slowly turned the skewers, sniffed critically and shook his head, and Aba’s gaunt Bornu wife came forth, examined the kabobs and vanished again, wrought me to the verge of frenzy. At last the old man seemed satisfied, for he plucked up one of the skewers, and having turned it round and round in the firelight, he sang out in a cracked voice, “Fatima! Ya karé!” and I breathed a sigh of relief and licked my lips. To this day I look back upon that meal with a kind of greedy pleasure. After the pungent, greasy, Fanti stews, this wholesome food seemed doubly delicious, and in truth those kabobs might have raised the ghost of an alderman. Then, too, there was cus-cus in clean wooden bowls, and flat baskets piled high with masa--little pancakes of pea-flour fried in clay moulds--and after all this a great calabash of mangoes was passed round, so that when I at length washed my hands in the bowl of water that was brought to each of the guests by Aba’s youngest girl, I was a better fed man than I had been since leaving Quittáh.