"However, he brought us rather more than he bargained for, till the whole blessed jungle seemed to be gathering between us and the boat to pelt us to death with nuts as big as eighteen-pound shot, husks and all; so off we had to hurry into the glare again, Sir Charles half-carrying his daughter through guinea-grass up to the waist--when somebody felt the smell of smoke, and next minute we broke out near it, wreathing up white from inside a high bamboo fence, propped up and tied all along with cocoa-nut husk. 'What the devil!' shouted the foremost cadet, as soon as he found the opening, 'they're cannibals!--roasting a black child, by heaven!' and in he dashed, being no chicken of a fellow _ashore_ at any rate, the others after him, while the judge, Simm, and I kept outside with the ladies, who were all of a shudder of course, what with the thought, and what with the queer scent of roast meat that came to us. 'Ha, ha!' laughed the cadet next moment, 'it's only a monkey, after all!--come in, though, Sir Charles, if you please, sir--nobody here, ladies.' "There, accordingly, was the little skinned object twirling slowly between two bamboo sticks, over a fire beneath two or three immense green leaves on a frame, with its knees up not to let its legs burn; about a dozen half-open sheds and huts, like little corn-stacks, thatched close with reeds, and hung with wattled mats of split bamboo, giving the place more the look of a farmyard than a village; as there was a big tree spreading in the middle, a few plantains, yams, and long maize-stalks flowering out of the coarse guinea-grass which the niggers hadn't taken the trouble to tread down all round inside of the fence.