melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in
many a day, and the blessings of all the ship's company. And then,
with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick
jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the
_Bruxellesville_ swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London
suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa. Next morning we
anchored in a dripping fog off Sekondi on the Gold Coast, to allow
an English doctor to find his way to a fever camp. For nine years he
had been a Coaster, and he had just gone home to fit himself, by a
winter's vacation in London, for more work along the Gold Coast. It
is said of him that he has "never lost a life." On arriving in
London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
that he was needed.

[Illustration: The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See in
Public Playgrounds.]

So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank "Luck to him,"
which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means "Life to
him," and to the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
death with the man who had never lost a life.

As the ship was getting under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun
helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his