Because her lines were so home-like and her captain came from Cape Cod, we wanted to call on the Gladys E. Wilden, but our own captain had different views, and the two ships passed in the night, and the man from Boston never will know that two folks from home were burning signals to him.

Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in extent, we expected quite a flourishing seaport.  Instead, Grand Bassam was a bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag.  Beyond the cocoanut palms we could see a great lagoon, and each minute a wave leaped roaring upon the yellow sand-bank and tried to hurl itself across it, eating up the bungalows on its way, into the quiet waters of the lake.  Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet of the bungalows.

We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who had come out to join her husband.  His factory is a two days’ launch ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not speak English.  Her husband had wished her, for her health’s sake, to stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had at once set out to join him.  She was a very pretty, sad, unsmiling young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband’s partner questions about the new home.  His answers, while they did not seem to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained safely in her London suburb.

Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.

The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow, another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in white under the bridge.

The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to the lifting waves in a two-seated “mammy chair,” like one of those vis-a-vis swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves, and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in many a day, and the blessings of all the ship’s company.  And then, with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the Bruxellesville swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa.