THE HOME FROM HOME 33

had a Bret Harte air without the excitement, the
saloons, the revolver shots or the horses. There was
only one horse in the whole city, and it was pointed
out to me by the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, a
thin piebald beast pulled down the main street like
a mule. There had been other horses from time to
time, but they had all died. Where there wasn't a
tin shed there were huge hoardings covered with last
year's Poppy Day posters (the date was January the
fifteenth). On the roofs the vultures sat nuzzling
under their wings with horrible tiny undeveloped
heads; they squatted in the gardens like turkeys; I
could count seven out of my bedroom window. When
they moved from one perch to another they gave no
sensation of anything so aerial as flight; they seemed
to hop across the street, borne up just high enough
by the flap-flap of their dusty wings.

This was an English capital city; England had
planted this town, the tin shacks and the Remem-
brance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the
hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and
electric fans and perfect service. Every call one paid
on a white man cost ten shillings in taxi fares, for
the railway to Hill Station no longer ran. They had
planted their seedy civilisation and then escaped from
it as far as they could. Everything ugly in Freetown
was European: the stores, the churches, the Govern-
ment offices, the two hotels; if there was anything
beautiful in the place it was native: the little stalls
of the fruit-sellers which went up after dark at the
street corners, lit by candles; the native women roll-
ing home magnificently from church on a Sunday
morning, the cheap European cottons, the deep coral