express his own views, adopted,
of course, for the occasion, upon the various matters affecting the
trade, or discuss with them the most promising schemes for baffling the
efforts of the British cruisers. He had noticed, very early in his
career as an officer of the Slave Squadron, that it was always the
_British_ who constituted the _bete noire_ of the slavers; the French
they feared very little; the Americans not at all.

These little incursions into the enemy's territory Captain Harrison
conducted with consummate boldness and skill, and with a considerable
measure of success, for it was quite a favourite amusement of his to
devise and suggest schemes of a particularly alluring character which,
when adopted by the enemy, he of course triumphantly circumvented
without difficulty. There was only one fault to find with this
propensity on the part of our skipper, but in my humble judgment it
constituted a serious one. It was this. Captain Harrison's personality
was a distinctly striking one; he was the kind of man who, once seen, is
not easily forgotten; and I greatly dreaded that some day, sooner or
later, the reckless frequenter of the low-class Freetown taverns would
be identified as one and the same with the captain of H.M.S. _Psyche_,
who was of course frequently to be seen about the streets in the uniform
of a British naval captain. Indeed I once took the liberty of
delicately hinting at this possibility; but the skipper laughed at the
idea; he had, it appeared, the most implicit faith in his disguises,
which included, amongst other things, a huge false moustache of most
ferocious appearance, and an enormous pair of gold earrings.

We had been at Sierra Leone a little over a fortnight, and our business
there was just completed, when the skipper came aboard on a certain
afternoon in a state of the highest good-humour, occasioned, as soon
transpired, by the fact that he had succeeded in obtaining full
particulars of an exceptionally grand _coup_ that had been planned by a
number of slavers in conjunction, which they were perfectly confident of
pulling off triumphantly.

It appeared, from his story, that intelligence had just been received of
the successful conclusion of a great slave-hunting raid into the
interior by a certain King Olomba, who had recently returned in triumph
to his town of Olomba, on the left bank of the Fernan Vaz river,
bringing with him nearly three thousand negroes, of whom over two
tho