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42
SIERRA LEONE, ETC
chap.

looked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the quantity of rocks marked down on it.

"Look here," said an anxious inquirer; "why are some of these rocks named after the Company's ships?"

"Think," said the calm old Coaster.

"Oh, I say! hang it all, you don't mean to say they've been wrecked here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the 'Yoruba Rock' and the ‘Gambia Rock?' The 'Yoruba' and the 'Gambia' are running now."

"Those," explains the old Coaster kindly, "were the old 'Yoruba' and ‘Gambia.' The 'Bonny' that runs now isn't the old 'Bonny.' It's the way with most of them, isn't it?" he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster. "Naturally," says his friend. "But this is the old original, you know, and it's just about time she wrote up her name on one of these tombstones." "You don't save ships," he continues, for the instruction of the new-comers, attentive enough now; "that go on the Kru coast, and if you get ashore you don't save the things you stand up in—the natives strip you."

"Cannibals!" I suggest.

"Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway native cloth. You remember D———?

"Well," says his friend. Strengthened by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic, saying soothingly, "there, don't you worry; have a good dinner." (It was just being laid.) "For if you do get ashore the food is