had also been constructed to keep slaves in when they were the staple export of the Gold Coast. They were so refreshingly cool that I lingered looking at them and their massive doors, ere being marched up to ground level again, and down the hill through some singularly awful stenches, mostly arising from rubber, into the big Wesleyan church in the middle of the town. It is a building in the terrible Africo-Gothic style, but it compares most favourably with the cathedral at Sierra Leone, particularly internally, wherein, indeed, it far surpasses that structure. And then we returned to the Mission House and spent a very pleasant evening, save for the knowledge (which amounted in me to remorse) that, had it not been for my edification, not one of my friends would have spent the day toiling about the town they know only too well. Mr. Dennis Kemp was chairman and superintendent of the Wesleyan Mission on the Gold Coast when I was last there, and he had filled this important position for some time. This is the largest and most influential Protestant mission on the West Coast of Africa, and it is now, I am glad to say, adding a technical department to its scholastic and religious one. The Basel Mission has done a great deal of good work in giving technical instruction to the natives, and practically started this most important branch of their education. There is still an almost infinite amount of this work to be done, the African being so strangely deficient in mechanical culture; infinitely more so, indeed, in this than in any other particular. All the other Protestant missions are following the Basel Mission's lead, and, recognising that a good deal of their failure arises from a want of this practical side in their instruction, are now starting technical schools the Church of England in Sierra Leone, the Wesleyans on the Gold Coast, and the Presbyterians in Calabar.
In some of these technical schools the sort of instruction given is, to my way of thinking, ill-advised; arts of no immediate or great use in the present culture-condition of West Africa—such as printing, book-binding, and tailoring—being taught. But this is not the case under the Wesleyans, who also teach smith's work, carpentering, bricklaying, waggon-
