This feed would not only
astonish those who talk about a "free breakfast-table," with its
silly slops and bread-stuffs; it would satisfy a sharp-set
Highlander. In addition to yams and sweet potatoes, plantains,
and perhaps rice, there will be cooked mangrove-oysters fresh
from the tree, a fry, or an excellent bouillabaisse of fish;
succulent palaver sauce, or palm-oil chop; poultry and meat. The
domestic fowl is a favourite; but, curious to say, neither here
nor in any part of tropical Africa known to me have the people
tamed the only gallinaceous bird which the Black Continent has
contributed to civilization. The Guinea fowl, like the African
elephant, remains wild. We know it to be an old importation in
Europe, although there are traditions about its appearing in the
fourteenth century, when Moslems sold it to Christians as the
"Jerusalem cock," and Christians to Moslems as the "bird of
Meccah." It must be the Greek meleagris, so called, says AElian,
from the sisters who wept a brother untimely slain; hence the
tears upon its plume, suggesting the German Perl-huhn, and its
frequent cries, which the Brazilians, who are great in the
language of birds, translate Sto fraca, sto fraca, sto fraca (I'm
weak).
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