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On my return to Bathurst I learned that Bakko enjoyed anything but an enviable reputation. It appeared that its inhabitants were outcast Mandingos, who had found it advisable to leave their native country, and who, while thoroughly grasping the full meaning of meum, had but hazy and unsatisfactory notions as to the interpretation of tuum, in consequence of which their society was rather avoided, and they were rarely seen in the haunts of civilisation, except on those few occasions on which the intelligent police might be observed escorting them towards a public building yclept the jail.

From Bakko I rode on over open country, adorned with herds of short-horned cattle and solitary pie-bald sheep with long tails, and where occasionally the wild ostrich may be seen, to Josswang, close to Cape St. Mary. There are a few houses here, which, in the palmy days of the colony, were the country residences of the Bathurst merchants, but which now are affected by the universal blight which has fallen upon the settlement and fast becoming ruinous. Ten miles from Cape St. Mary is the Mandingo town of Sabbajee, now belonging to British Combo, which was the scene of one of the glorious exploits of the great advertiser Colonel Luke S. O’Connor, who commanded a force which took the town, stockaded like all such, by assault. That individual’s mania for self-laudatory memorials was so great that on this occasion he, as Governor, took away two large kettledrums which had been captured by a West India Regiment, and, after a short interval, returned them to the regiment, embellished with two silver plates, which set forth that he, during his administration of the government, had presented these drums to it for gallantry in the field; and then sent in a bill for the plates.