especially with a pea-shooter loaded with treacherous sawdust cartridges in my hand. As I looked behind, I saw him waving his trunk, which I understood to mean, "Good-bye, young fellow, it is lucky for you you went in time, for I was going to pound you to a jelly."

As I was congratulating myself, a wasp darted fiercely at me and planted its sting in my neck, and for that afternoon my anticipated pleasures were dispelled. Arriving at camp I found the men grumbling; their provisions were ended, and there was no prospect for three days, at least, of procuring any. With the improvidence usual with the gluttons, they had eaten their rations of grain, all their store of zebra and dried buffalo meat, and were now crying out that they were famished.

The tracks of animals were numerous, but it being the rainy season the game was scattered everywhere; whereas, had we travelled during the dry season through these forests our larders might have been supplied fresh each day.

Some time about 6 P.M., as the Doctor and I were taking our tea outside the tent, a herd of elephants, twelve in number, passed about 800 yards off. Our fundi, Asmani and Mabruki Kisesa, were immediately despatched in pursuit. I would have gone myself with the heavy Reilly rifle, only I was too much fatigued. We soon heard their guns firing, and hoped they were successful, as a plentiful supply of meat might then have been procured, while we ourselves would have secured one of the elephant's feet for a nice delicate roast; but within an hour they returned unsuccessful, having only drawn blood, some of which they exhibited to us on a leaf.

It requires a very good rifle to kill an African elephant. A No. 8 bore with a Fraser's shell, planted in the temple, I believe, would drop an elephant each shot. Faulkner makes some extraordinary statements, about walking up in front of an elephant and planting a bullet in his forehead, killing him instantly. The tale, however, is so incredible that I would prefer not to believe it; especially when he states that the imprint of the muzzle of his rifle was on the elephant's trunk. African travellers-especially those with a taste for the chase-are too fond of relating that which borders on the incredible for ordinary men to believe them. Such stories must be taken with a large grain of salt, for the sake of the amusement they afford to readers at home. In future, whenever I hear a man state how he broke the back of an antelope at 600 yards, I shall incline to believe a cipher had been added by a slip of the pen, or attribute it to a typographical error, for this is almost an impossible feat in an African forest. It may be done once, but it could never be done twice running. An antelope makes a very small target at 600 yards distance; but, then, all these stories belong by right divine to the chasseur who travels to Africa for the sake only of sport. I have heard young officers on the Zanzibar coast, who were but just past their teens, relating with an astonishing glibness and volubility the tremendous adventures they had had with elephants, leopards, lions, and what not. If they shot at a hippopotamus in the river, they had killed him; if they had met an antelope near the coast, it was almost sure to be a lion, and they had bowled him over; if they had seen an elephant in a zoological garden, it was sure to be told that he had been met in Africa, and "bagged, sir, without any trouble; and I have the tusks

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at home now, which I can show, if you like, some day." It is a disease, a mania with some people, that they never can relate the positive, literal, exact truth. Travelling in Africa is adventurous enough as it is, without any fiction. Mostly all men who were with the Abyssinian Expedition will recollect that wonderful Major" who was accustomed to unfold the dire, the terrible, and the extraordinary, in stories by the bushel. I gave that gentleman one day a buffalo skin which I had received from Satanta, chief of the Kiowas, near Medicine Lodge, Kansas; yet the next day I heard it given out that he had shot the buffalo on an American prairie with a pistol bullet. This is only an illustration of the imaginary which many travellers love to relate; it is a tendency with some men to exaggerate. South and North African hunters are famous for their variety of hunting anecdotes, which I consider to have been simply flourishes of the pen.

On the 13th we continued our march across several ridges; and the series of ascents and descents revealed to us valleys and mountains never before explored; streams rushing northward, swollen by the rains, and grand primeval forests, in whose twilight shade no white man ever walked before.

On the 14th the same scenes were witnessed-an unbroken series of longitudinal ridges, parallel one with another and with Lake Tanganika. Eastward the faces of these ridges present abrupt scarps and terraces, rising from deep valleys, while the western declivities have gradual slopes. These are the peculiar features of Ukawendi, the eastern watershed of the Tanganika.

In one of these valleys on this day we came across a colony of reddish-bearded monkeys, whose howls, or bellowing, rang amongst the cliffs as they discovered