Kate Meredith, Financier by Cutcliffe Hyne

In the factories which dot the West African seaboard and rivers, death is such a constant visitor that much of his grimness had faded. At home, in England, or America, or Hamburg, we shiver with apprehension whenever our relative who is "out on the West Coast" comes up into the mind; but the relative himself takes his doses of fever when they fall due with a certain callous philosophy, and on his emergence shattered and shrunken from the attack, congratulates himself on not being a candidate for a gun-case and a top hat that time. Those who go up in the bush and are there engulfed, those who get drowned in the ever-grinding surf, those who go out by the thousand and one opportunities which the climate and the surroundings offer, slip off their human garb with an easy nonchalance; and those who are left pronounce some pithy epitaph over the deceased, and go on with their quicker interests.

With the native African, death is an event of even smaller moment still; and in the event of a quarrel, one competitor will often sit down, cuddle his knees, shut his eyes, and there and then deliberately suspend his vital processes, merely to cause temporary annoyance to his rival.