and vermilion and yellow flowers, and astonishing with its vast
beans. A flight of stone stairs leads from the courtyard to the
upper part of the castle where the living rooms are, over the
extensive series of cool tunnel-like slave barracoons, now used as
store chambers. The upper rooms are high and large, and full of a
soft pleasant light and the thunder of the everlasting surf breaking
on the rocky spit on which the castle is built.

From the day the castle was built, now more than a hundred years
ago, the surf spray has been swept by the on-shore evening breeze
into every chink and cranny of the whole building, and hence the
place is mouldy--mouldy to an extent I, with all my experience in
that paradise for mould, West Africa, have never elsewhere seen.
The matting on the floors took an impression of your foot as a light
snowfall would. Beneath articles of furniture the cryptogams
attained a size more in keeping with the coal period than with the
nineteenth century.

The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have
never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in. I really cannot say
why. Seen from the sea it is a pleasant looking land. The long
lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous line of
blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in other
places show in the dim distance. It is hard to think that it is so
unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by. It has high
land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one usually,
at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove on
acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated
open-forested Gold Coast land. There are many things to be had here
and in Lagos which tend to make life more tolerable, that you cannot