and was a cripple for six months after that. And now I've told
you the yarn, so I will have a drop of Hollands and go to bed."

KING BEMBA'S POINT, A WEST AFRICAN STORY, By J. Landers

We were for the most part a queer lot out on that desolate southwest
African coast, in charge of the various trading stations that were
scattered along the coast, from the Gaboon River, past the mouth of the
mighty Congo, to the Portuguese city of St. Paul de Loanda. A mixture of
all sorts, especially bad sorts: broken-down clerks, men who could not
succeed anywhere else, sailors, youths, and some whose characters would
not have borne any investigation; and we very nearly all drank hard, and
those who didn't drink hard took more than was good for them.

I don't know exactly what induced me to go out there. I was young
for one thing, the country was unknown, the berth was vacant, and the
conditions of it easy.

Imagine a high rocky point or headland, stretching out sideways into
the sea, and at its base a small river winding into a country that
was seemingly a blank in regard to inhabitants or cultivation; a land
continuing for miles and miles, as far as the eye could see, one expanse
of long yellow grass, dotted here and there with groups of bastard
palms. In front of the headland rolled the lonely South Atlantic; and,
as if such conditions were not dispiriting enough to existence upon the
Point, there was yet another feature which at times gave the place a
still more ghastly look. A long way off the shore, the heaving surface
of the ocean began, in anything like bad weather, to break upon the
shoals of the coast. Viewed from the top of the rock, the sea at such
times looked, for at least two miles out, as if it were scored over with
lines of white foam; but lower down, near the beach, each roller could
be distinctly seen, and each roller had a curve of many feet, and was an
enormous mass of water that hurled itself shoreward until it curled and
broke.

When I first arrived on the Point there was, I may say, only one house
upon it, and that belonged to Messrs. Flint Brothers, of Liverpool. It
was occupied by one solitary man named Jackson; he had had an assistant,
but the assistant had died of fever, and I was sent to replace him.
Jackson was a man of fifty at least, who had been a sailor before he
had become an African trader. His face bore testimony to the winds
and weather it had encountered, and wore habitually a grave, if