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They followed Franky's hammock-bearers up a grassy knoll, on the top of which stood a group of pine trees, whose stems looked like dark red gold in the sunbeams. They had taken Franky there to show him Manchester, far away in the blue plain, against which the woodland foreground cut with a soft clear line.
Immediately upon hearing this I called the hammock-bearers together, and going down to the beach, I went a considerable way along it toward a dark spot, which I knew to be a group of natives.
When he dresses, eats, drinks, and moves about the sun is as constantly on his mind, as it is on the face of the sun-dial. The chief ascent to the top of the bluff where the white people live is up a steep cement walk about eighty yards long. At the foot of this a white man will be met by four hammock-bearers, and you will see him get into the hammock and be carried in it the eighty yards.
The women flocked out at the cry of the hammock-bearers and, nursing their babies, sat down to the enjoyment of a stare; they had lost, however, the merriment of their more civilized sisters, and they hardly ever vouchsafed a laugh or a smile.
Four young women then entered the building, and, taking their places, one at the head of each sleeper, proceeded, with the aid of large feather fans, to protect their helpless charges from the attacks of the mosquitoes and other insect torments with which the village swarmed; when the hammock-bearers filed out, and the white men were left to sleep off, undisturbed, the effects of the potent drug which had been artfully mingled with the milk with which their coffee had that day been prepared.
But we must not expect too much from the denizens of African seaports, mostly fishermen who will act hammock-bearers, a race especially fond of Bacchus and worshippers of the 'devil Venus. Perhaps a little too much license is allowed to them in the matter of noisy and drunken 'native customs, palavers, and pow-wows.
In the sheltered basement of a wayside rest-house a gang of native hammock-bearers slept or chattered drowsily through the last hours of the long mid-day halt; wide awake, yet almost motionless in the thrall of a heavy lassitude, their European master sat alone in an upper chamber, staring out through a narrow window-opening at the native village, spreading away in thick clusters of huts girt around with cultivated vegetation.
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