wise," particularly along here. I get up without delay, and find myself quite well. The cat has thrown a basin of water neatly over into my bag during her nocturnal hunts; and when my tea comes I am informed a man "done die" in the night, which explains the firing of guns I heard. I inquire what he has died of, and am told "He just truck luck, and then he die." His widows are having their faces painted white by sympathetic lady friends, and are attired in their oldest, dirtiest clothes, and but very few of them; still, they seem to be taking things in a resigned spirit. These Ajumba seem pleasant folk. They play with their pretty brown children in a taking way. Last night I noticed some men and women playing a game new to me, which consisted in throwing a hoop at each other… The point was to get the hoop to fall over your adversary's head. It is a cheerful game. Quantities of the common house-fiy about—and, during the early part of the morning, it rains in a gentle kind of way; but soon after we are afloat in our canoe it turns into a soft white mist.
We paddle still westwards down the broad quiet waters of the O'Rembo Vongo. I notice great quantities of birds about here—great hornbills, vividly coloured kingfishers, and for the first time the great vulture I have often heard of, and the skin of which I will take home before I mention even its approximate spread of wing.[1] There are also noble
- ↑ Since my return home I have read that rather rare and very charming book, Ten Years Wanderings among the Ethiopians, by T. J. Hutchinson, a gentleman who was for a long time H.B.M. Consul in Calabar. He also has heard of this bird, which was described as "measuring five fathoms, i.e., thirty feet,—from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other. Its beak is a fathom, or six feet long. No man dares to go near it, and no gun fit to kill it. Its favourite food is obtained by killing the elephant, whose eyes it devours." Mr. Hutchinson goes on to say that "inquiring the colour of the bird's plumage the answer I received—namely, that its feathers were green," made me shut my note-book, with a "mental reservation" as to the ignorance of Baron Cuvier (p. 242). I am not going bail for these measurements being correct to an inch or so, and must state that the bird is not green but brown and gray, and the noise it makes when settling in the forest trees over one's head is very great, but for further particulars, you must wait until I or some other West Coaster brings home a specimen, and then———!
