painfully along the
street would, after a brief examination of his leg to see if there was
any external mark which would account for the lameness, be sent at a
round trot down the road, amid peals of laughter from the women and
girls looking on.

The indignation of some of the men thus seized, loaded and sent up
country under a strong escort, was very funny, and their astonishment
in some cases altogether unfeigned. Small shopkeepers who had never
supposed that they would be called upon to labor for the defense of
their freedom and country, found themselves with a barrel of pork
upon their heads and a policeman with a loaded musket by their side
proceeding up country for an indefinite period. A school teacher was
missing, and was found to have gone up with a case of ammunition. Casual
visitors from down the coast had their stay prolonged.

Lazy Sierra Leone men, discharged by their masters for incurable
idleness, and living doing nothing, earning nothing, kept by the
kindness of friends and the aid of an occasional petty theft, found
themselves, in spite of the European cut of their clothes, groaning
under the weight of cases of preserved provisions.

Everywhere the town was busy and animated, but it was in the castle
courtyard Frank found most amusement. Here of a morning a thousand
negroes would be gathered, most of them men sent down from Dunquah,
forming part of our native allied army. Their costumes were various but
scant, their colors all shades of brown up to the deepest black. Their
faces were all in a grin of amusement. The noise of talking and laughing
was immense. All were squatted upon the ground, in front of each was a
large keg labelled "pork." Among them moved two or three commissariat
officers in gray uniforms. At the order, "Now then, off with you," the
negroes would rise, take off their cloths, wrap them into pads, lift
the barrels on to their heads, and go off at a brisk pace; the officer
perhaps smartening up the last to leave with a cut with his stick, which
would call forth a scream of laughter from all the others.

When all the men had gone, the turn of the women came, and of these two
or three hundred, who had been seated chattering and laughing against
the walls, would now come forward and stoop to pick up the bags of
biscuit laid out for them. Their appearance was most comical when they
stooped to their work, their prodigious bustles forming an apex. At
least two out of every three had babi