This of course is only one side of the question, and, I am bound to say on the other side, that the servants of the two steamship companies, which run vessels from Liverpool to West Africa, are a great deal too free in the violent application of their boots to the persons of negroes who may go on board the steamers; so perhaps the latter retaliate on those Europeans who live in the place as a kind of compensation.
An otherwise friendly critic thought it strange that this should be the state of things at Sierra Leone. It is strange; but then things are not on the West Coast of Africa as they are elsewhere. In what other colony, for instance, could one find a Colonial official, holding a high position and drawing a large salary, who advanced money to all applicants on the security of jewelry and such small portable articles of value, or in what part of the British Empire an officer, head of a Colonial department, who uses his influence to _persuade_ his negro subordinates to insure their lives in a company for which he is agent, thereby pocketing a commission of twenty-five or thirty per cent. on each policy?
I do not think I have hitherto made any mention of the black cobras-di-capello which are the pest of the barracks at Tower Hill. These playful companions seem to have a particular predilection for the sunny banks and rocks of that hill, and, during my two months’ residence there in 1874, four were killed within five or ten yards of the officers’ mess; but they appear to have become much more familiar of late years, and, a few days after my arrival, one was seen, and another killed, in a bedroom on the second story. As a bite from one of these snakes causes certain death within three hours, one would wish to have less dangerous domestic creatures at large. There must be hundreds of them in the vicinity of the barracks, as I have seen eight or nine myself at different times; and while walking up the hill one evening in the dusk barely escaped treading on one, being only just warned in time by a shrill hiss. These cobras usually go about in couples, and during the breeding season they will, though totally unmolested, make direct for any person who may happen to approach them.