companied Major Denham to
Kouka, and were left there while he made his campaign with the Sultan's
army. But Lieutenant, afterwards Captain, Hugh Clapperton is far too
delightful and interesting a person to be dismissed with so little
notice. Before he joined Major Denham he had managed to get into his
thirty-four years adventures enough to fill a volume, and after
returning with the Major to England and contributing his part to the
story of the expedition, we find him starting again, six months later,
with Captain Pearce and Dr. Morrison as his companions, from Badagry, on
the Bight of Benin, on the West Coast of Africa. But the deadly climate
soon diminished the little party. It was only three weeks before
Clapperton had to read the burial service over the graves of his two
comrades, and found himself left to carry on their work, with his young
servant, Richard Lauder, as his only companion.

But Clapperton was not the man to turn back from any task to which he
had set his hand, and in Lauder he had a colleague ready to follow him
through thick and thin. The two were as unlike in appearance as they
could well be: Clapperton was six feet high and broad in proportion, a
strong, genial, simple-hearted sailor, with a love of fun which must
have helped him through many a dark day; and Lauder was small and slim,
less robust, and probably less light-hearted than his master, but with a
passion for change and adventure which had drawn him from his Cornish
home, against the advice of friends and kindred, to volunteer for the
expedition. And in Captain Clapperton he found a hero to match with any
of those whose stories had delighted his boyhood. It is from him that we
have the history of their journey together, and every page is full of
loving admiration for the master whose courage no danger or suffering
could daunt, and who was yet full of thought and consideration for his
companion, carrying him on his back across the rivers when he was too
weak to ford them on foot, and writing continually to cheer him when
obliged to leave him behind to rest and recover. There are records of
hair-breadth escapes, of suffering and homesickness and parting, as in
most stories of African travel, but this tale has to do with laughter
instead of tears.

The travellers halted for some time at a place called Wow-Wow, where the
King, Mohammed, was friendly to them. There lived there a certain widow
named Lyuma, or 'Honey,' very rich, and, according