Guinea Coast, and on the left was a low sandy ridge covered with sparse sea-grass and broad-leaved creeping bean. Just such a bean grows on the sea-shore, outside the gates of my house here in Montego Bay, where I write this book. Here and there was a little low undergrowth and coarse elephant grass, and again and again were palm-thatched villages, with surf boats drawn up on the sand, and groves of coconut palms that added beauty to the scene. The brawny, dark men fished, flinging their nets into the sea, or launched their surf boats on a wider venture, and the women beat their cassava or banana into _kenky_ or _fufu_, and the little naked pot-bellied children played in the shade as children play all the world over, and raced to see the unusual sight of a white woman who had departed from the usual custom of the white folks and come along the shore. Such is the scene now, such was the scene more than three hundred years ago, when the maiden Queen sat on the throne of England and Hawkins made his first expedition, such was _the scene a hundred years later when Phillips in the Hannibal_ of 450 tons and 36 guns came on an expedition trading for gold, elephants' teeth, and slaves--more especially for slaves. I thought of those old-world men as we passed along, and the sea kept wiping out all traces of the passing of my hammock bearers. But the people would remember that in such a year a white woman had passed that way, even as I remembered that Phillips had passed. And the cool of the morning passed, and the breathless sweltering March midday of the Guinea Coast held all the land, and grey stone walls loomed up clear-cut against the blue of the sky. “Annamabu, Ma. You chop?” That was all my headman thought. For him there was no past. He had come from Cape Coast this morning--if he could only make me see that it was fit and suitable that I should stay at Annamabu till the following morning, that was all the future he asked.