Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I Sierra Leone to Lokoja On the loth of April, 1902, we left Sierra Leone, embarking on the Sekondi for Forcados, en route to Northern Nigeria. We had spent seven months in Sierra Leone, my husband doing duty with a company of native gunners, and had grown to heartily dislike the place. In spite of its undeniable beauty, it is the possessor of a most unpleasant climate, and the impossibility of getting horse exercise, and the necessity of continually ascending or descending steep hills, either on foot, or, worse still, in a hammock, was most distasteful to us both after four years of the free and active life of Indian military stations. So we could not help looking upon our departure somewhat as a release, and even bidding good-bye to our many kind friends did not entirely damp our joy as we steamed out of the harbour and passed the lighthouse, gleaming white amidst the luxuriant greenery and bright blue water, and set our faces and thoughts towards Nigeria, and the life of a Resident there. It certainly was a step in the darkest dark ; no Englishwoman yet had gone where I meant to go, or done what I hoped to do : we knew little or nothing of the conditions of life before us except that it was ' rough, very rough !' I had met only one official from Nigeria, and he looked at me doubtfully and in silence when I announced my intention of accompanying my husband, much as one regards a wretched scraggy-looking screw, sometimes produced by an Irish horse-dealer, with confident asseverations as to his qualities as a hunter —and yet, the ' screw' scrambles along fairly all right sometimes! One of my friends in Sierra Leone—having visited Accra—felt qualified to speak, and, in endeavouring to dissuade us from this rash venture, assured me that ' Nigeria was just like Accr...