THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA	259
suffering a little from prickly heat, but Liberia was
really the healthiest place in Africa.
He was always inclined to over-state his case, as
when he told me that in the Km war no women had
been killed, only one woman accidentally wounded,
while the British Consul's report spoke of seventy-
two women and children dead. Now he remarked
that there had never been any yellow fever in
Liberia; the manager of the British bank who had
died of it in Monrovia (his death was one of the
reasons why .the British Bank of West Africa with-
drew altogether from Liberia) had brought the infec-
tion with him from Lagos. All the other deaths
could be traced to inoculation. There was less
malaria, he went on, in Liberia than in any other
part of the West Coast: I had seen myself, he said,
that there were no mosquitoes. But providence gave
Colonel Davis a raw deal in this case because, when
evening came and we were waiting for him to join
us over our whisky, the Quartermaster brought news
that he was down with a bad attack of fever.
So the Quartermaster entertained us our last
evening in Tapee-Ta, sitting moonily opposite with
his great seal's eyes begging, begging all the time for
friendship. He had taken an immediate fancy to me,
he said, when he saw me come out of the French path
by Ganta; he had felt then that we would be friends.
He would write to me and I would write to him. It
was lonely in Tapee: he was used to the life of the
capital; in Monrovia it was so gay, the dancing and
the cafes on the beach. By the time we arrived the
Season would be over, but it would still be gay, so
much to do and see, dancing by moonlight. . . , His