The stone-built, white-washed market buildings of Free Town have a
creditably clean and tidy appearance considering the climate, and
the quantity and variety of things exposed for sale--things one
wants the pen of a Rabelais to catalogue. Here are all manner of
fruits, some which are familiar to you in England; others that soon
become so to you in Africa. You take them as a matter of course if
you are outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it)
you will look on them as a blessing and a curiosity. For lower
down, particularly in "the Rivers," these things are rarely to be
had, and never in such perfection as here; and to see again
lettuces, yellow oranges, and tomatoes bigger than marbles is a
sensation and a joy.

One of the chief features of Free Town are the jack crows. Some
writers say they are peculiar to Sierra Leone, others that they are
not, but both unite in calling them Picathartes gymnocephalus. To
the white people who live in daily contact with them they are turkey
buzzards; to the natives, Yubu. Anyhow they are evil-looking fowl,
and no ornament to the roof-ridges they choose to sit on. The
native Christians ought to put a row of spikes along the top of
their cathedral to keep them off; the beauty of that edifice is very
far from great, and it cannot carry off the effect produced by the
row of these noisome birds as they sit along its summit, with their
wings arranged at all manner of different angles in an "all gone"
way. One bird perhaps will have one straight out in front, and the
other casually disposed at right-angles, another both straight out
in front, and others again with both hanging hopelessly down, but
none with them neatly and tidily folded up, as decent birds' wings
should be. They all give the impression of having been extremely