Many of the young girls among the negroes are pretty, with their soft eyes and skin like velvet, their merry laugh and graceful figures.

But in a very few years all this disappears, and by middle age they are bent, and wrinkled, and old.

All loads are carried by women, with the exception only of hammocks, which are exclusively carried by men.
Thus, then, the Ashantis settled down to what appeared to Frank to be an interminable business, and what rendered it more tantalizing was, that the morning and evening guns at the English forts could be plainly heard.
It was on the 7th of June that Ammon Quatia reconnoitered Elmina, and the news came next day that a hundred and ten white men in red coats had landed from a ship which had arrived that morning off the coast.

Frank judged from the description that these must be marines from a ship of war.

In this he was correct, as they consisted of marines and marine artillerymen under Lieutenant Colonel Festing, who had just arrived from England.