wished that the beaters had an English gamekeeper behind them; for they avoided the thick places, where game was most likely to be found. The whole job was done in a slovenly manner, and game was scarce. In fact, this method of hunting was well calculated to expose the nakedness of the land. There were a few deer, which laid about in the wood singly like hares, and, like hares, preferred to steal back when you wished to drive them forward. After several blanks, a bush - deer (Cephalolophus sylvicultrix) was caught. As I had given orders that no animal should be killed till I had seen it, I was called to the spot, and found a reddish-colored doe struggling in the net, sometimes giving a sharp bark, and snapping with her teeth like a dog. Feeling no inclination to have the taming of such a shrew, I gave the death-signal, and a clumsy coup-de-grace was given with an axe. Her head was tucked through her hind legs, and these tied to her fore legs. Thus made a bundle of, she was crammed into a basket, and strapped on to the back of a young woman who was emblematically covered with red paint, and who had accompanied us in case of such a contingency; for it is astonishing how these black lords of creation detest that kind of work. Once at Bapuku a man refused to guide me through the forest to a plantation, a distance of two or three miles, for fear that I should kill some game on the road and compel him to carry it-indolence refined to foresight.

It was to one of these plantations that I determined to go immediately on my return, which took place next day, as the hunters refused to go out while there was meat in the town. I had been told that the elephants came every night to eat the plantains and to root out the cassada, and that thereby the villages were reduced almost to starvation.

An African plantation is formed on the principle of a backwood "clearing," but in a very incomplete manner; and this is perhaps the only part of the world where a man goes up a tree to cut it down. Passing a vine-hoop round the tree and his waist (as the natives of Senegambia do when they ascend the palm-tree for its wine), the woodman mounts about twelve feet, where the trunk has, of course, a much smaller circumference, hacks it into. two with his rude axe, and jumps down nimbly at the right moment. The trees are suffered to lie where they happen to fall. All that is done is to burn the branches off. The women then scrape holes in the ground, plant plantain and cassada, and Nature does the rest. Batatas are sometimes grown, but not often, as that

involves the labor of ridging the soil, from which, on the following year, a thick shrubby vegetation invariably springs.

There are usually two or three huts on a plantation where the women sleep in the hole-scraping season. Having arrived at the Bapuku plantation with Abauhi, a Corisco man and a Bapuk native, we took possession of a small hovel, much to the disgust of two venerable hags therein dwelling. However, I gave them tobacco, and Abauhi polite words. The ogresses, appeased, went off to another hut. Night approached, and I took my dinner-a handful of parched ground-nuts and a cup of fragrant tea.

I had previously walked round the plantation, and had found but one elephant's track-that a week old. I was clearly a victim of African exaggeration; but this had already happened so often that I was now inured to it. I could also console myself with the reflection that I should enjoy a better night's rest where I was than in the town; even at that distance I could faintly hear the sound of the eternal drum.

Whether negroes sleep at all (except on rainy days) is a matter which requires serious investigation. They certainly at night do not, and it would be easier to get to sleep at 1 A.M. in a bedroom looking out on the Haymarket in London than it is in an African village—so noisy are these children of Ham.

At first, owing to the strength of my tea, or the extreme lightness of my repast, I felt no inclination for my cork couch, and, seating myself on the trunk of a fallen tree, I listened to the tigercat's melancholy cry, and to those birds of the forest, which, day or night, seem never to be silent.

Presently these sounds were hushed; the sea-breeze, which had rustled the leaves of the forest, died away: all nature held her breath.

Above the trees, which stood black against the sky, rose a red and sullen moon.

The atmosphere seemed in flames; I breathed with difficulty; and a sense of loneliness began to creep upon me.

At such moments as these it is a terrible thing to be far away from all civilized beings. There are some who say that there is no solitude so sad as the solitude of the city. It is because they have never been in the desert. In the city there are varied sights and sounds which prevent one from looking inward too long. In monotonous Africa the eye can seldom relieve the mind; selfcommunion becomes eternal. Reflection from a blessing broods

itself into a woe. It leaves the intellect to rankle in the heart. In this detestable land, as the body grows enfeebled, the mind, joined to it by subtle links, becomes diseased as well. Our sweetest memories are hideously distorted and deformed. In the love, the friendship, the fidelity which we have enjoyed, we detect a deep-laid deceit, a sordid scheme. Deriving no consolation from the past, we can have no hope for the future. We perceive no possibility of success in our enterprise; we are ridiculed and ruined; we think of what we might have done, and that is the saddest of all human thoughts. Crushed in a vice of horror and despair, we put the revolver to our ear—and why? because a thunder-storm happens to be coming on, and the air is rather close.

I went to bed, and was awoke by the rumbling of thunder, and by the wind howling in the distance. The men opened their sleepy eyes, rubbed them, and hastily made up the fire. We could see the lightning through the chinks, and the tornado approached us with a dreadful sound. As it burst on us, there was a report like a musket-shot close to us.

"Who that?" cried Abauhi, starting up.

He was answered by a loud struggling crash at the very door. The two men gave a yell, and literally tore their way out through the fragile hovel wall. No passion is so infectious as fright, and I made what is called in turf parlance a "good third.”

The first moment out of doors nearly deprived me of my breath, so fiercely fell the rain: the large and violent drops made my hands and face smart, as if the rain had been hailstones. In two minutes I was drenched to the skin; in five minutes, to the bone. Meantime I continued to follow my men through bush and bramble at a tearing pace, till I became anxious to learn the purpose of our Hegira. When I stopped, Abauhi cried, "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do not stay there!"

"Why not?" said I, sulkily, for I had just fallen among thorns. "Look!" he said, with a superb gesture; "you no see that tree?"

I looked and saw a tree torn in half by the wind; the upper part falling to the ground, while the lower trunk remained standing, gaunt and bare as a sepulchral stone.

The tree must have been cut half way through by a native, and the work completed by the wind. This natural explanation did. not occur to me at the time, and the effect, which seemed at defiance with all the natural laws, was startling enough.