There were pins and needles, yarn and thread, that have taken the place of the wilder thorn and fibre; all kinds of small hardware; looking-glasses in lacquered frames; beads of sorts, cowries and reels of cotton; pots of odorous pomatum and shea-butter nuts; feathers of the plantain-bird and country snuff-boxes of a chestnut-like fruit (a strychnine?) from which the powder is inhaled, _more majorum_, through a quill; physic-nuts (_tiglium_, or croton), a favourite but painful native remedy; horns of the goat and antelope, possibly intended for fetish 'medicine;' blue-stone, colcothar and other drugs. Amongst the edibles appeared huge achatinae, which make an excellent soup, equal to that of the French snail; ground-nuts; very poor rice of four varieties, large and small, red and dark; cheap ginger, of which the streets are at times redolent, and which makes good home-brewed 'pop;' the Kolá-nut, here worth a halfpenny and at Bathurst a penny each; the bitter Kolá, a very different article from the esculent; skewered _rôts_ of ground-hog, a rodent that can climb, destroy vegetables, and bite hard if necessary; dried bats and rats, which the African as well as the Chinese loves, and fish _cuits au soleil_, preferred when 'high,' to use the mildest adjective. From the walls hung dry goods, red woollen nightcaps and comforters, leopards' and monkeys' skins, and the pelt of an animal which might have been a gazelle. Upon the long counters or tables were displayed the fruits and vegetables. The former were the custard-apple or sweet-sop (_Annona squamosa_), the sour-sop (_A. muricata_), the Madeiran _chirimoya_, (_A. cherimolia_), citrons, sweet and sour limes, and oranges, sweet and bitter, grown in the mountains; bananas (_M. paradisiaca_), the staff of life on the Gold Coast, and plantains (_M. sapientum_), the horse-plantains of India; [Footnote: The West Indian plantain is apparently unknown or unused] pine-apples more than half wild; mangoes terribly turpentiney unless the trunk be gashed to let out the gum; 'monkey-plums' or 'apples' and 'governor's plums.' The common guavas are rank and harsh, but the 'strawberry guava,' as it is locally called, has a delicate, subacid flavour not easily equalled. The _aguacáte_, or alligator-pear (_Persea gratissima_), which was _not_ 'introduced by the Basel missionaries from the West Indies,' is inferior to the Mexican. Connoisseurs compare its nutty flavour with that of the filbert, and eat it with pepper, salt, and the sauce of Worcester, whose fortune was made by the nice conduct of garlic. The papaw [Footnote: The leaves are rubbed on meat to make it tender, and a drop of milk from the young fruit acts as a vermifuge.] should be cooked as a vegetable and stuffed with forced meat; the flesh of the granadilla, which resembles it, is neglected, while the seeds and their surroundings are flavoured with sherry and sugar. There is an abundance of the _Eriobotrya