the little, black-bearded skipper,
all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained
scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English,
fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the _tour du proprietaire_,
among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of
the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom
Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger
children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to
which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant to the
story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to
relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you. I should have
chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as far as I can make
out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the
best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached
residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads
this. But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail. It was on the sea,
away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last
word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by
Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of
his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of
Liosha.

As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When Jaffery
put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and
letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy references to Doria
were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity. But Liosha was the
central figure in many a picture.

Here, I say, is another extract:

"Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing that
worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with her
after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going round
and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go with her.
I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't see her
settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I think
I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling
tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy has
managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine. It
shews strength of character anyway.