Chap.
I. [The Battle of Amoaful]
II. [The Scarabœus]
III. [The Lost One]
IV. [A Year of Joy]
V. [In Hampshire Again]
VI. [Thoughts that often lie too deep for tears]
VII. ['Oh, for a Horse with Wings!']
VIII. [A Birthday Gift]
IX. [Cadbury Redivivus]
X. [At Cape Coast]
XI. [The Old Warning]
XII. ['Ashes to Ashes']
XIII. [Events Progress]
XIV. [Bella's Dot]
XV. [In Bayswater]
XVI. [The Four-in-Hand Club]
XVII. [Humiliation]
XVIII. [Miss De Jobbyns' Admirer]
XIX. [The Foreclosure Effected]
XX. [Homeless]
XXI. [Conclusion]
MISS CHEYNE OF ESSILMONT.
CHAPTER I.
THE BATTLE OF AMOAFUL.
The firing proved a mistake—the result of a false alarm—so the night passed without any other alerte or disturbance, and all remained quiet during the temporary halt at Prahsu; but the troops heard of many strange things as occurring at Coomassie, all deemed by the natives portentous of its coming fate.
In its market-place—that scene of daily blood and murder—where the predecessor of King Koffee devoted three thousand victims 'to water the grave' of his mother—an aërolite fell, to the terror of the people; but there came still a greater prodigy. A child was born which instantly began to converse, and, to prevent it having intercourse with supernatural visitors, it was placed alone in a room under guards, who in the morning found that it had vanished, and that nothing lay in its place but a bundle of withered bones; and on this the fetish men argued 'that Coomassie itself would pass away, and nothing remain thereof but dead leaves;' and on the same day and hour that Lieutenant Grant of the 6th—the first white man—crossed the Prah, there sprang up a mighty tornado, that levelled the great tree under which the king used to sit, surrounded by his warriors. This caused a profound sensation among the Ashantees, who gathered by thousands around it in the market-place, which at that time was described by one who saw it as 'a den of reeking corpses, shrieking and tortured victims—men and women butchered by hundreds—where skulls and human bones lay about as oyster-shells do at home!'
By order of the king's fetishmen two prisoners had knives run through their cheeks, and were tied up in the woods to die, as a test of whether our invasion would be successful. The idea of the fetishmen was that, if the victims died soon, all would be well with Ashantee; but they lived, one for four and the other for nine days—so the nation gave itself over for lost.
On the 6th of January—the day the fetish-tree fell—we shed the first blood in that land of horrors, when Lord Gifford, at the head of fifty men, captured a village occupied by an Ashantee outpost, and killed many of its defenders.
And so, till the forward movement began, the troops were impatient during the halt at Prahsu, the soldiers making wry faces at their daily doses of quinine, and still more so at their weak ration of grog—only half a gill per man, or a gallon of rum to sixty-four men—and the officers missing sorely the pleasures of the long, glittering, flower-laden mess-table, and the charms of the girls they had left behind them, and of whom they were reminded by Du Maurier in some old stray numbers of our friend Mr. Punch.