122 
MISSION TO ASHANTEE. 
A few only of the many curious observations of our Ashantee 
friends recur to me. One captain told us he had heard that the 
Enghsh were so constantly in palavers, one with another, that their 
houses, Avhich he understood to be made of wood, the same as their 
ships, were always fixed on wheels ; so that when a man had 
quarrelled with his neighbour, he moved to another part of the 
bush. Another insisted that monkies (whom the Moors said sprung 
from the Israelites, who disobeyed Moses) could talk as well as 
men; but thfey were not such fools ; for if they did, they knew 
men would make them work. — This is better than Pliny's account 
of monkies playing chess. 
The King walked abroad in great state one day, an irresistible 
caricature; he had on an old fashioned court suit of General 
Daendels' of brown velveteen, richly embroidered with silver 
thistles, with an English epaulette sewn on each shoulder, the coat 
coming close round the knees, from which the flaps of the waistcoat 
were not very distant, a cocked hat bound with gold lace, in 
shape just like that of a coachman's, white shoes, the long silver 
headed cane we presented to him, mounted with a crown, as a 
walking staff, and a small dirk round his waist. 
The King presented one of our servants with six ackies of gold, 
for making trowsers for his child, and mending him a pair of 
drawers, which he thought it extravagant to put on under trowsers 
or small clothes, and therefore wore them alone. 
I fixed a rude leaping bar in the outer yard of our house, and 
trained the horse to it, preparatory to getting him over the trunks 
of trees on the path: this brought even greater levees than the 
camera obscura, or the telescope. Sometimes a gazer would start 
from the eye piece of the latter, to lay hold of the figure at the end, 
as he expected ; and they all insisted on both being taken to pieces 
in their presence, that they might see what was inside At length, 
