During my last visit to Sá Leone I secured a boat, and, accompanied by Dr. Lovegrove, of the A.S.S. _Armenian_, set out to inspect the lower bed of the Rokel and the islands which it waters. Passing along Fourah Bay, we remarked in the high background a fine brook, cold, clear, and pure, affording a delicious bath; it is almost dry in the Dries, and swells to a fiumara during the Rains. Its extent was then a diminutive rivulet tumbling some hundreds of feet down a shelving bed into Granville Bay, the break beyond Fourah. On the way we passed several Timni boats, carrying a proportionately immense amount of 'muslin.' Of old the lords of the land, they still come down the river with rice and cocoa-nuts from the Kwiah (Quiah) country, from Porto Loko, from Waterloo, and other places up stream. They not unfrequently console themselves for their losses by a little hard fighting; witness their defence of the Modúka stockade in 1861, when four officers and twenty-three of our men were wounded. [Footnote: _Wanderings in West Africa_, vol. i pp. 246-47.] Some of the boats are heavy row-barges with a framework of sticks for a stern-awning; an old Mandenga, with cottony beard, sits at each helm. They row _simplices munditiis_. At Sá Leone men are punished for not wearing overalls, and thus the 'city' becomes a rag-fair. The Timni men are dark negroids with the slightest infusion of Semitic blood; some had coated their eyebrows and part of their faces with chalk for ophthalmia. They appeared to be merry fellows enough; and they are certainly the only men in the colony who ever pretend to work. A Government official harshly says of them, 'I would willingly ascribe to the nearest of our neighbours and their representatives in Freetown, of whom there are many, some virtues if they possessed any; but, unfortunately, taken as a people, they have been truly described by able and observant writers as dishonest and depraved.' Mr. Secretary evidently forgets the 'civilising' and infectious example of Sá Leone, _versus_ the culture of El-Islam. Arrived at Bishopscourt, we disembarked and visited the place. Here in old days 'satisfaction' was given and taken; and a satirical medico declared that forty years of _rencontres_ had not produced a single casualty. He was more witty than wise; I heard of one gentleman who had been 'paraded' and 'winged.' Old Granville Town, which named the bay, has completely disappeared; the ruins of the last house are gone from the broad grassy shelf upon which the first colonists built their homes.