There was a marked improvement in our food after some months, owing to our obtaining a better cook from the coast. The coast men were at first in doubt about their safety among the Bulu, and none of those would go with us who could get a position at the coast. But when a number of their men had come back alive their fear was removed and we obtained better help. Our first cook was a common workman who had never cooked before. It was part of my duty to instruct him. To the objection that I had never cooked anything in my life there was the compensating consideration that the best way in the world to learn anything is to be obliged to teach it to somebody else. The moment that I dreaded most in they course of the day was that in which the cook appeared coming towards me to get the order for dinner. For, with Irish stew, salmon and sausage, what opportunity is there for the exercise of a fine gastronomic imagination? It was the same thing from day to day; and if I derived no other good from the experience, I at least learned for all time to sympathize with housekeepers in the monotonous circularity of the domestic routine. Under my painstaking instructions the cook learned to wash his hands instead of simply wiping them on his hair or his legs, to place a tin of meat on the fire (after punching a hole in the top) and to take it off when I told him to do so; he learned to put plantains into the fire to roast and to take them out any time he happened to think about it. But he had not yet learned the difference between warm water and hot water when he tired of his work and returned to his beloved home, while I began on another candidate for kitchen honours. About the time I had taught him to boil water he also wearied of work and went home. Then I hired a Bulu boy and began to instruct him even with more assurance, for I was now an experienced teacher. The Bulu boy learned fast, though he evinced an incorrigible disposition to carry his dish towel on his head, or tied round his neck. Finally after an experience of trials and tribulations in many chapters I appealed to Mrs. Godduhm of Batanga who trained a cook specially for us; and he proved a saint of the frying-pan. It was this cook Eyambe, who afterwards, as I have told in writing on bush travel, when we were overtaken by night in the forest, insisted that I should take his shirt, and said: “You must take him and wear him please. This bush he no be too bad for we black man; but my heart cry for white man.”