the tropical rain poured down in ceaseless
torrents, compelling the unsuspicious colonists to keep beneath their
roofs. Indeed, no one dreamed of a forced march by human beings on
that dreadful night of tempest, else it might have gone hard had I
been detected in the desecration of colonial soil. Still I was
prepared for all emergencies. I never went abroad without the two
great keys of Africa--gold and fire-arms; and had it been my lot to
encounter a colonist, he would either have learned the value of
silence, or have been carried along, under the muzzle of a pistol,
till the gang was in safety.

While it was still dark, I left the caravan advancing by an interior
path to Little Bassa, where one of my branches could furnish it with
necessaries to cross the other colony of Bassa San Juan, so as to
reach my homestead in the course of three days. Meanwhile I retraced
my way to Monrovia, and, reaching it by sunrise, satisfied the amiable
colonists that I had just taken shelter in their harbor, and was fresh
from my dripping cutter. It is very likely that no one in the colony
to the present day knows the true story of this adventure, or would
believe it unless _confessed_ by me.

It was often my fate in Africa, and elsewhere, to hear gossips declare
that colonists were no better than others who dwelt amid coast
temptations, and that they were sometimes even willing to back a
certain Don Theodore Canot, if not absolutely to share his
slave-trade! I never thought it prudent to exculpate those honorable
emigrants who were consolidating the first colonial lodgments from the
United States; for I believed that _my_ denial would only add
sarcastic venom to the scandal of vilifiers. But now that my African
career is over, and the slave-trade a mere tradition in the
neighborhood of Liberia, I may assure the friends of colonization,
that, in all my negro traffic, no American settler gave assistance or
furnished merchandise which I could not have obtained at the most
loyal establishments of Britain or France. I think it will be granted
by unprejudiced people, that the colonist who sold me a few pieces of
cloth, lodged me in travelling, or gave me his labor for my
flesh-colored gold, participated no more in the African slave-trade
than the European or American supercargo who sold assorted cargoes,
selected with the most deliberate judgment in London, Paris, Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, expressly to suit the well-know