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Their huts are very small and dingy, being constructed with bent sticks on which palm-leaf matting is stretched; inside they are decorated with their paraphernalia for weddings and camel-travelling, all elaborately decorated with cowrie and other shells, the most remarkable of these things being the tall conical hats with long streamers used for dances at weddings, entirely covered with cowrie shells in pretty patterns.
"Not a rap!" was the laconic and dignified reply "not a cross, not a cowrie! You haven't a shadow of claim to anything. All that Mr. Hairsplitter may have said goes for nothing, as it is not down in black and white, in legal phrase." I was now, you must know, my friends, getting up in years that is to say, I was now somewhere about one-and-twenty.
On the Gold Coast it was a certain length of cowrie shells on a string; at Loango it was a "piece" which had the value of a common gun or of twenty pounds of iron; at Kakongo it was twelve- or fifteen-yard lengths of cotton cloth called "goods"; while on the Gambia it was a bar of iron, apparently about forty pounds in weight.
Awfully clever chap, Cowrie, a match for any mamma in England, I can tell you. He is not going to marry any woman but the one he wishes to marry. No more am I. That's why I can't marry. I've got no money. The governor picked out a young woman from Liverpool for me last year, a brewer's daughter, with pots of it, and wanted me to make up to her." "Oh, he did!
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