The Congo and Coasts of Africa by Richard Harding Davis
page 22 of 144 (15%)
page 22 of 144 (15%)
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spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet of the bungalows. We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had at once set out to join him. She was a very pretty, sad, unsmiling young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained safely in her London suburb. Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her. The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow, another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in white under the bridge. The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to the lifting waves in a two-seated "mammy chair," like one of those _vis-à-vis_ swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves, and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast |
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