urs makes suspicion a certainty, and once again old
school-fellows are flung together for an hour to talk in an African
swamp of old times in English playing-fields." For an hour in an
African swamp! and then on again through the never-ending dark green
aisles towards the savages smitten with the blood-lust in "the
death-place."

The Ashantis did not show fight, and King Prempeh, sucking a huge nut,
surrounded by court-criers and fly-catchers, with three dwarfs dancing
in front of his throne, consented humbly and meekly to receive the
soldiers of the Queen. After Sir Francis Scott had presented Prempeh
with his ultimatum the meeting broke up for the night, but the "Wolf
that never Sleeps" was on the look-out with his Native Levy for a
possible surprise, or for His Majesty's escape. You can imagine how
"Sherlock Holmes," as Burnham the American scout calls our hero,
enjoyed that work. In the quiet night, under the white stars, a
council was being held in the savage king's palace, and B.-P.
"shadowed" that regal hut with eyes and ears alive. At three o'clock
in the morning a white light streamed out of the palace doorway, and
through the clinging mist went a string of white-robed figures, one
of them the queen-mother. This little company passed within twenty
yards of B.-P., and it was followed stealthily by him until the
queen's residence, not hitherto known, was marked down. Then the
watchers returned to their ambush outside the palace, and caught a
councillor who was stealing away in the night. Almost immediately
after this gentleman had been made prisoner two fast-footed men came
upon the scene. They evidently suspected something, for they suddenly
pulled up and stood listening intently. One of them was within arm's
length of Baden-Powell. Quietly B.-P. stood up. The man did not move.
A moment's pause, and then, quick as a flash of lightning,
Baden-Powell had gripped him, and had, moreover, got hold of the gun
he was carrying. Then the patrol came up, the Ashanti was pinned, and,
as B.-P. concludes the narrative, "a handsome knife in a leopard-skin
scabbard was added to our spoil."

After the palace had been searched and the whole of the fetish village
had been burned to the ground, Prempeh, with B.-P. to look after him,
set out for Cape Coast Castle. The bitterness to a soldier of that
return journey, without a shot having been fired, can hardly be
imagined by a civilian, and would certainly be strongly reprehended