This quasi-venerable site is a little holm a hundred yards in diameter, somewhat larger than the many which line the river's western bank. We found its stony shingle glazed with a light-green sediment, which forbade bathing and which suggested fever. The material is conglomerate, fine and coarse, in an iron-reddened matrix; hence old writers call it a 'sort of gravelly rock, a little above water.' Salsolaceæ tapestry the shore, and fig-trees and young calabashes spring from the stone: the ground is strewn with white shells, tiles, bricks and iridescent bottles--the invariable concomitants and memorials of civilisation. The masonry, lime and ashlar, is excellent, but time and the portentous growth of the tropics have cracked and fissured the walls. Masses of masonry are fallen, and others are assuming the needle-shape. The great quadrangle had lozenge-shaped bastions at each end, then lined with good brick-work: the outliers, which run round the river-holm, were three horseshoe redoubts 'with batteries along the palisades from one to another.' Four old iron guns remained out of a total of sixty to seventy pieces. The features were those of the ancient slave-barracoon --dwelling-houses, tanks and cisterns, magazines, stores, and powder-room, all broken by the treasure-hunter. The return to Bathurst was a bitter draught. We had wind and water against us, and the thick mist prevented our taking bearings. Hungry, thirsty, weary, cross, and cramped, we reached the steamer at 5 A.M., and slept spitefully as long as we could. The last displeasure of my latest visit to Bathurst was the crowd of native passengers, daddy, mammy, and piccaninny, embarking for Sierra Leone, and the host of friends that came to bid them good-bye. They did not fail to abscond with M. Colonna's pet terrier and with the steward's potatoes: no surveillance can keep this long-fingered lot from picking and stealing. It is a political as well as a social mistake to take negro first-class passengers. A ruling race cannot be too particular in such matters, and the white man's position on the Coast would be improved were the black man kept in his proper place. A kind of first-class second-class might be invented for them. Nothing less pleasant than their society. The stewards have neglected to serve soup to some negro, who at every meal has edged himself higher up the table, and whose conversation consists of whispering into the ear of a black neighbour, with an occasional guffaw like that of the 'laughing jackass.' 'I say, daddee, I want _my_ soop. All de passenger he drink 'im soop; _me_ no drink _my_ soop. What he mean dis palaver?' The sentence ends in a scream; the steward smiles, and the first-class resumes-- 'Ah, you larf. And what for you larf? I no larf, I no drinkee soop!' Here the dialogue ends, and men confess by their looks that travelling sometimes _does_ throw us into the strangest society.