But, indeed and indeed, the air is thick with memories. Here, in these dark rooms on the ground floor, hot and airless, did they store their goods in olden days, “perpetuanos and sayes, knives, old sheets, pewter basons and muskets,” which Phillips has left on record were the best goods with which to buy slaves on the Gold Coast in the seventeenth century. They did not bring out their women, but they took to themselves wives of the daughters of the land, comely, smooth-skinned, dark-eyed girls, with full, round bosoms and a carriage like queens, and the daughters of these unions were much sought after. “Then came Mrs Rankin,” writes Phillips, of a factor's temporary wife, “who was a pretty young mulatto with a rich silk cloth about her middle, and a silk cap upon her head, flowered with gold and silver, under which her hair was combed out at length, for the mulattoes covet to wear it so in imitation of the whites”--remember the white men wore their hair long in those days--“never curling it up or letting it frizzle as the blacks do. She was accompanied, or rather attended by the second's and doctor's wives, who were young blacks about thirteen years of age. This is a very pleasant way of marrying,” goes on the gossipy mariner, “for they can turn them off and take others at pleasure, which makes them very careful to humour their husbands in washing their linen, cleaning their chambers, etc., and the charge of keeping them is little or nothing.” Poor children, poor, happy, sad, pitiful children, bearing children and taking a woman's part in ministering to the pleasures of these their masters at an age when our children would still be babies in the nursery. It was a custom that died hard. Twelve years ago the nursing sister at Sekondi told me that when first she was stationed there she saw a girl, just arrived at marriageable age, sent round to all the likely white men in the town, tricked out in all the bravery common to the occasion. She saw her return, too, return in tears, not because she had been chosen, but because she had not! The standard of morals is higher on the coast in these times. And the end of these women? No one has ever told us of their end. I remember when I was in Sekondi a sad-faced mulatto woman with the remains--only the remains--of great beauty about her, though possibly she was barely thirty-five, and the nursing sister shook her head over Adjuah.