In general the coast of West Africa is not beautiful; although it has a weird fascination for those who have once lived on it. It is low-lying, straight and monotonous: a gleaming line of white surf, a golden strip of sandy beach, a dark green line of forest—and that is all, for days and days and days, and for some two thousand miles, only broken at long intervals by the great estuary that is a peculiar characteristic of African rivers, and by low hills far away on the horizon. Many of the traders are living, not in the white settlements, but in single trading-houses and far apart along this lonely shore. They like it or they hate it. To some it is an idle dream-life that they enjoy, and to others it is a nightmare that they abhor. Some of those who came aboard looked like haunted men. Each day is exactly like all the others, and the natural surroundings never vary however far they may wander along the beach—three endless lines of colour stretching away to eternity, the dull green forest front, the yellow strip of sand, the white surge of the foaming surf, and beyond it the boundless sea. Even in the darkest night the forest still shows as a blacker rim against the darkness, and the surf-line is white with a whiteness that no night can obscure. The unceasing sound of it is like low thunder, and unless one loves it he must often think what a relief it would be if it would stop but for one brief moment, and how the silence would “sink like music on his heart.” In such places, and in the bush, the traders sometimes wear only pajamas, by day as well as night. There are natives enough around, and there is always noise enough; but it is the noise that only emphasizes solitude. And one were better to live entirely alone than to be subjected to the influence of African degradation without the moral restraints of home and the society of equals, unless his religious belief be something more than a mere acceptance of tradition, and his principles something more than conventional morality. There is a better class of natives whose society might relieve loneliness, but the trader, as a rule, does not gather this class around him.