200 SPORT, TRAVEL, AND ADVENTURE 



both sexes, clad with scanty drapery and a few without 

 even modesty's fig-leaf, paraded the town. Christmas 

 Eve was a fiction, in the sense that it was late in the 

 day they began the celebration, for it was early morn 

 when they commenced their rounds, playing pipes, sing- 

 ing, whistling, and drum and tin-kettle whacking. 

 Some of them there were who danced and skipped to 

 the rhythmic thumping of tom-toms, but the soul's 

 aspiration of every group of boys and girls was to 

 make the loudest possible din. They succeeded only 

 too well. Ere sunset the town was a babeldom of 

 cries and drummings, and the Cape Coast Castle boy, 

 unable longer to repress himself, set off squibs, crackers, 

 and kindled huge bonfires. As darkness fell the tumult, 

 if possible, increased. From every mud house and 

 dwelling poured strains of boisterous merriment. Each 

 abode had its pack of singers and drummers. Through 

 four bars of discord, with ' damned reiteration,' backed 

 by fiendish heat and persistency, they shrieked, tom- 

 tomed, shuffled, and danced the livelong night. It 

 was pandemonium broken loose, and the very birds, 

 disturbing the moonlight, shrank affrighted to their 

 remotest roosts in the bush. And there were bands- 

 Christmas waits that went from house to house. At 

 M'lver's we were so honoured, until they learned to 

 dread our household's accuracy of bowling limes, 

 oranges, cocoanuts, and our general excellent marks- 

 ship with the catapult. With these delectable ' waits ' 

 were women dancers, who shuffled, chanted, puffed, and 

 sweated with as much abandon as ' Cutty Sark ' or an 

 Indian nautch-girl. Christmas Day brought no respite, 

 and whilst decent folk went to church the coarser fibre 

 of the town shouted and hopped, as very black 'Arrvs 



