THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA 057

we should not have to wait longer than a week at
that miserable little port before a boat passed.

While I was having a bath in preparation for a
long siesta the Quartermaster arrived. He wanted to
buy a bottle of whisky for his brother and his brother
had sent five shillings. I said I had none left, or at
any rate only just enough to see me to the Coast
Then at two-thirty by my watch, when I had just
fallen asleep, he came again with a note from the
D.C. inviting me to dinner at two o'clock. I had
eaten a large lunch already, but I went, taking with
me half a bottle of whisky very diluted.

I was reminded of one of those curious thick crude
groups by Samuel Butler. One had slipped back sixty
years in time to a Victorian Sunday dinner. The
only thing lacking was the wife; she helped to serve
the dinner. There at .the end of the table sat Papa,
yellow-faced Wordsworth in his heavy side-whiskers
dressed in a thick dark Sunday suit with a gold
watch-chain across his stomach and a gold seal
dangling from it. On the walls were faded Victorian
photographs of family groups, whiskers and bustles
and parasols, in Oxford frames. All except myself
and Colonel Davis, who sat at the other end of the
table and carved the goose, were in Sunday clothes:
an old negro who had withered inside his clothes like
a dried nut in its shell and who was one of the Judges
of Assize, the native Commissioner from Grand Bassa
and another Commissioner who was very shy and
scared of Colonel Davis and whom I suspected of
having played the hymns. The Commissioner of
Grand Bassa, I suppose, was responsible for the hot
music.