the work will not be placed in inexperienced hands, whose blunders of ignorance will give the invaluable and infallible process a bad name. Retracing our steps, we made the chief Sensense's village, and persuaded him to guide us. The short cut led through a forest and a swamp, which reeked with nauseating sulphuretted hydrogen. We avoided it on return by a _detour_. After a short hour's walk we ascended a banana-grown hillock, upon which lay the ruins of the little mining-village Abeseba. A few paces further, through a forest rich in gamboge and dragon's blood (not the _D. draco_), in rubber and in gutta-percha (?), where well-laden lime-trees gave out their perfume, placed us upon the great south-eastern reef. It was everywhere drilled with pits, and we obtained fine specimens from one which measured twenty feet deep. Several of them were united by rude and dangerous tunnels. I have heard of these galleries being pierced in other places; but the process is not common, and has probably been copied from Europeans. On March 1 was held a formal palaver of headmen and elders. The Akankon concession had been bought by Messieurs Bonnat and Wyatt from Sensense of the fetish, whose ancestors, he declared, had long ruled the whole country. The rent, they say, was small--$4 per mensem and 15 pereguins (135_l_. [Footnote: Assuming at 9_l_. the pereguin, which others reduce at 8_l_. and others raise to 10_l_.]) per annum--when operations began. I have heard these gentlemen blamed, and very unjustly, for buying so cheap and selling so dear--17,000_l_. in cash and 33,000_l_. in shares. But the conditions were well worth the native's acceptance; and, if he be satisfied, no one can complain. The apparently large amount included the expenses of 'bringing out' the mine; and these probably swallowed a half. When Sensense received his pay, a host of rival claimants started up. In these lands there is no law against trespass; wherever a plantation is deserted the squatter may occupy it, and popular opinion allows him and his descendants the permanent right of using, letting, or selling it. I do not think, however, that this rule would apply to a white man. Sensense's claims were contested by three chiefs--Kofi Blay-chi, Kwako Bukari, who brought an acute advocate, Ebba of Axim, and Kwako Jum, a fine specimen of the sea-lawyer; this bumptious black had pulled down the board which marked the Abeseba reef, and had worked the pits to his own profit. After many meetings, of which the present was our last, the litigants decided that hire and 'dashes' should be shared by only two, Sensense and Kofi Blay-chi. Energetic Jum, finding his pretensions formally ignored, jumped up and at once set out to 'enter a protest' in legal form at Axim.