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were all back again as talkative as ever. This went on all day, except sometimes boys and youths took the places of the women and girls. Our male visitors were more bumptious, ignorant, and conceited than those of the other sex, and were some of the most objectionable persons I have ever met with.

We were now travelling in the rains, and our road lay chiefly through morass and swamp. We had to pass through a district called Usmawo, famous for the avarice and turbulence of its people. Usmawo lies midway between the districts of Urima and Usukuma, from which latter place we had engaged a number of naked savages as porters. Owing to the bad character of the people through whose country we were about to travel, we decided to make the attempt to slip past them in the night. Just as the sun went down we left our camp, and cautiously the thin line of dusky figures crept onwards through the darkness. Some of the long black trunks, carried by the unclad Wasukuma porters, looked like coffins in the dim light, and the moonbeams gleaming on the white paint of others gave them from a little distance the appearance of pale and flickering fires; and so in solemn silence this ghostly band of naked figures filed past the sleeping villages of Usmawo like a procession of the dead. To our great satisfaction we reached the border unobserved, but immediately we crossed over and stood in the territory of the Wasukuma the pent-up feelings of our porters broke forth and vented themselves in peals