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The English-speaking and Christianized negroes in Bathurst, most of whom are emigrants from Sierra Leone, are a vast improvement upon their compatriots in that negro paradise. They positively do a little work occasionally, and some few of them might even be called industrious. I could not discover the cause of the improvement. Perhaps it is owing to the good example of the Jolloffs, or to there not being such a redundancy of missionaries in the Gambia; but I think it is more probably due to the fact that the island is so small that there is no spare land on which they can squat and do nothing (even if there were any soil to produce anything), so that they are obliged to work or starve. They build cutters of from twenty-five to sixty tons’ burden, which are used by the French merchants for bringing produce down the river from their outlying factories, and for carrying cargo between Bathurst and Goree or Dacar.

In the one street of Bathurst there is a fairly good market-shed for native vendors of fruit and green-stuff, and I was going to look round and see what there was to buy when I caught sight of a large slab of marble let in to the rubble wall of the gateway. It bore the following legend:—