r, caused him to be decapitated;
and while the blood still streamed from the severed neck, the
monster's head was thrust into the fresh-torn bowels of his mother!

CHAPTER LIII.

The first expedition upon which Don Pedro Blanco despatched me
revealed a new phase of Africa to my astonished eyes. I was sent in a
small Portuguese schooner to Liberia for tobacco; and here the trader
who had never contemplated the negro on the shores of his parent
country except as a slave or a catcher of slaves, first beheld the
rudiments of an infant state, which in time may become the wedge of
Ethiopian civilization. The comfortable government house, neat public
warerooms, large emigration home, designed for the accommodation of
the houseless; clean and spacious streets, with brick stores and
dwellings; the twin churches with their bells and comfortable
surroundings; the genial welcome from well dressed negroes; the
regular wharves and trim craft on the stocks, and last of all, a visit
from a colored collector with a _printed_ bill for twelve dollars
"anchor dues," all convinced me that there was, in truth, something
more in these ebony frames than an article of commerce and labor. I
paid the bill eagerly,--considering that a document _printed in Africa
by Negroes_, under North American influence, would be a curiosity
among the infidels of Gallinas!

My engagements with Blanco had been made on the basis of familiarity
with the slave-trade in all its branches, but my independent spirit
and impatient temper forbade, from the first, the acceptance of any
subordinate position at Gallinas. Accordingly, as soon as I returned
from the new Republic, Don Pedro desired me to prepare for the
establishment of a branch factory, under my exclusive control, at New
Sestros, an independent principality in the hands of a Bassa chief.

I lost no time in setting forth on this career of comparative
independence, and landed with the trading cargo provided for me, at
the Kroomen's town, where I thought it best to dwell till a factory
could be built.

An African, as well as a white man, must be drilled into the traffic.
It is one of those things that do not "come by nature:" yet its
mysteries are acquired, like the mysteries of commerce generally, with
much more facility by some tribes than others. I found this signally
illustrated by the prince and people of New Sestros, and very soon
detected their great inferiority to the Soosoos, Mandingoes, an