File:Round the black man's garden (1893) (14589610899).jpg

Identifier: roundblackmansga00colv (find matches)
Title: Round the black man's garden
Year: 1893 (1890s)
Authors: Colvile, Zélie Isabelle Richaud de Préville, lady
Subjects: Africa -- Description and travel
Publisher: Edinburgh and London, W. Blackwood and sons
Contributing Library: Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston University

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last he certainly walked away from his instructors in the matter of gracefulness ; for what-ever other good points he may have, grace is not the most marked characteristic of a drunken sailor.Yet ugly though the monkey was—the very image of a sallow-faced old woman—he never for a moment lost his sense of the picturesque. For the next three days we hugged the shore,stopping at every village where a signal was hoisted and a barrel of palm-oil was to be collected; but as all were very much alike, and all approached through a belt of breakers, without the advantage of the big English surf-boats, as at Accra, in which to face them, I showed the better part of valour and remained on board, until at noon on the 11th we anchored off Monrovia, the Liberian capital, a lovely spot situated on a high well-wooded promontory on the left bank of the St Paul river. As we were to remain here for some hours, and the bar was a fairly passable one, we went ashore,and were well rewarded by a walk through the most
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MONROVIA. 335 remarkable capital that I have yet come across,—the strangest mixture of mushroom growth with gradual decay, careful architecture with utter neglect, super-abundance of vegetation with lack of human life. Broad, well-laid-out streets, in which half-a-dozen four-in-hands could drive abreast, are choked with rank grass, and occupied by a few stray half-starved curs; broad airy stoeps, under which the eye naturally seeks for a well-to-do Dutch farmer or merchant smoking his pipe and counting his gains, are either deserted and rotting, or occupied by a fat negro lying dozing in a hammock. Monrovia is distinctly a good town gone wrong, and at first it surprises and almost shocks one ; yet one can hardly expect it to be otherwise. Built in 1823 by a society of American philanthropists, a ready-made negropo pulation was despatched from America for its occupation, and left to carve out its own destinies. Now the male Liberian, happy in the possession of the title of Right Honourable, Gene

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