The German Missions follow a much better plan. To each Mission is attached a European carpenter, blacksmith, cooper, tailor, or shoemaker, as a sort of lay-brother, and the pupils are taught these trades. The immense advantage of having his children taught a trade gratuitously is patent to the most careless negro parent, and he sends his children to the school accordingly; while in after-life they have the means of earning an honest livelihood, and becoming useful members of the community. Accra now supplies almost the whole of the Gold Coast and the Niger delta with artisans, because a German Mission has been established at Christiansborg for years, where the system of inculcating the great fact that honest and useful labour is much more praiseworthy than idle psalm-singing has been steadfastly pursued. I should advise those quasi-philanthrophists, who prefer squandering their money on the utopian negro to relieving the necessities of the poor of their own country, to withdraw their support from the English societies and transfer it to the Basle and Bremen Missions. The only recreation which Bonny affords is curlew-shooting, which I enjoyed several times with my host of the “Adriatic.” Towards sun-set, when the curlew began to fly down towards their feeding-ground at Breaker Island at the mouth of the river, we used to take a boat up one of the numerous creeks, run her on to the mud at one side, and proceed to make a screen of mangrove branches. From behind this leafy cover we bagged many a bird on its flight down the creek. The number of guanas found in these channels is enormous; when keeping perfectly quiet under our cover we could see dozens upon dozens of them, some four or five feet in length, crawling about on the opposite bank, or leaping out of the water in pursuit of fish. This reptile is sacred, or fetish, at Bonny, as is the python in Dahomey and the crocodile at Accra.