paid their debts to the Europeans. The latter part of the message was too much for an irascible, one-eyed old fighting chief named Jack Wilson Pepple, so off he marched to his own house, and fired the first round shot into the Annie Pepple part of the town, and civil war was commenced. It was a bit overdue, the last having taken place in 1855. As a rule, they come round about every ten years, like the epidemics of malignant bilious fever of the coast.
The Annie Pepple House was not slow to reply, but Ja Ja knew he was over-matched, both in guns and numbers of fighting men, so he only kept up a semblance of a fight sufficiently long to allow him to make a retreat to a small town called Tombo, in the next creek to the Bonny creek, only about three miles from Bonny by water, less by land.
From here he was in a better position to parley with his opponents, and make terms if possible, but he soon saw that no arrangement less than the complete humiliation of himself and people was going to satisfy his enemies, for besides the jealousy of Oko Jumbo, the young King George Pepple, son of the gentleman who had been to England and brought out the European suite, had not forgotten that the Annie Pepple house, represented by the late Elolly, had been the chief opponents of his late father when he returned to Bonny in 1861 after his exile.
This young man had been educated in England, and I must say did credit to whoever had had charge of his education. He both spoke and wrote English correctly, and had his father been able to hand over to him the kingship as he had received it in 1837, he might have
