Near the meat-market is the double row of houses with shops upon the ground-floor, not unlike a Banyan's street in outer Bombay, but smaller, dirtier, meaner far. Here the stranger can buy dry goods and a few curiosities of Mandenga manufacture--grigris (teraphim or charms), bows, spears, and saddles and bridles like those of the Somal, both perfectly useless to white men. The leather, however, is excellent as the Moroccan, and the work dates from the days when the Saracens pushed southwards from the Mediterranean to the Niger-valley. Wild animals are at times offered for sale, but Darkey has heard exaggerated accounts of prices paid in England for grey parrots, palm-birds, monkeys, bush-antelopes, mongooses, ground-pigs, and other 'small deer' brought from the rivulets behind Freetown. Sundry snakes were offered for sale, the Mandenga, 4 to 5 feet long, with black marks upon a yellow ground, and the spitting serpent, between 5 and 6 feet long, with a long head, also dark above and silvery grey below. I doubted the fact of its ejecting saliva till assured by the Rev. John Milum that two missionaries at Lagos, Messieurs J. B. Wood and David, had suffered severely from inflamed eyes after the contemptuous ophine _crachat_. All along the coast is a cerastes (horned snake), whose armature is upon the snout and whose short fat form suggests the puff-adder. The worst is a venomous-looking cobra, or hooded viper, with flat, cordate head, broad like all the more ferocious species. It is the only thanatophid whose bite I will not undertake to cure. We carried on the A.S.S. _Winnebah_, for the benefit of Mr. Cross, of Liverpool, a big black ape, which the Sá Leonites called a 'black chimpanzee.' Though badly wounded she had cost 27_l_., and died after a few days of the cage. The young chimpanzees were valued at 6_1_. I looked in vain for the old inn, the only thing in the place, a dirty hovel, kept, in 1862, by a Liberian negro, inscribed 'Lunch-house' on a sign-board flanked by the Union Jack and the U.S. 'oysters and gridiron.' Nothing has succeeded to this 'American hotel,' and visitors must depend upon the hospitality of acquaintances. A Frenchman lately opened a _Gasthaus_, and lost no time in becoming bankrupt. There is, however, a manner of boarding-house kept by a Mrs. King.