like a gramophone record, the same magic shriek rent the same still air with the same magic appearance of the hippos. I spent the whole night wondering what this homo-hippo league meant at all at all, and—and I am wondering still. Call it "black art" if you like, I prefer to think of old Nyemba as an artful black the phenomenally long time these huge hippos were submerged is not such a puzzle after all, for it seems as if the hippo's very ungainly bulk is in its favour. That is to say, with lungs full of air, his specific gravity thereby becomes almost equal to that of water, with the result that he can coolly walk or run along the bottom of the river-bed as though it were dry land.

With a land of this sort that can boast not one butcher's shop, sometimes the Missionary with his own. right arm can open up a long-shut tribe by a happy kill of hippo-fancy thousands of pounds of beef for one bang of a gun. The killing of one such monster gave us our first footing on the Luapula. By a long detour of miles and months here we come out on the Luapula, striking the left bank a few miles below the Fallsobject to pick a Mission site at Johnston Falls.1 Advancing from the West this time has made the muddle, for the off-bank is agog with excitement, my quondam friends "turned to be my enemies." Across the stream they throw many a dainty morsel of black logic: "You

:

1 Mr. Pomeroy began here, then came Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, then Mr. Campbell and others. The second phase of this station was when Mr. and Mrs. Lamond and Mr. Sims retired back from the river to Kaleba, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell branching off to begin work on Lake Bangweulu.

came" (this is the sort of thing) "from the North only three months ago, and now you come from the West, therefore you are not you." My answer, of course, is the eager echo "I certainly am I, but you are not you, because I guard the entente cordiale (Chipwane) while you set it at naught." There goes Chief after Chief filing past on the off-bank with the biggest muster of guns he ever made, every man of them munching this apple of discord, "Why advance from the West, when you came from the North?" A reminder this, that in Central Africa nearly all the polemics arise from our negro's prejudices as to a suspected point of the compassinstance, Sir Alfred Sharpe repelled for coming from the East, and Hannington murdered because he entered Buganda from Busoga. wordy windbag. Deeds are the only eloquent words in such a fix, so I produced quite a knock-down argument by-inviting the whole tribe to dine with us. Depend upon it, the world's slums are all alike, slum street, slum town, or slum tribe, and the simplest solution is to open a huge soup kitchen, free tickets for Chiefs and slaves. This is that line of least resistance so inelegantly rendered in the Luapula alliterative proverb, "Brow of brass, but belly of butter." Curious way of capturing a tribe, camping on its utmost border and asking your enemies out to supper. Without money and without price those soup tickets-and no wonder! For the net local cost of my four tons of hippo-meat worked out at the round sum of-sixpence. Eight thousand nine hundred

Nor avails it to reply like a

and eighty pounds of meat, not at 6d. per lb., but the whole 8980 lb. costing a single and solitary sixpence.

This is how it came about. Slipping over to the hostile bank by stealth at sundown, I killed a monster hippo in its very best days. Tried the temple shot, and the bullet zigzagged through the brain-magic bullet that, for did it not metaphorically slay also the enmity of my hundreds of enemies? Listen to yonder glad cry on the off-bank; the news catches on, drums beating and clouds of canoes darting across in the dusk to verify the kill. Canoes, nota bene, yet there were no such things in these latitudes yesterday-oh no, scarcely knew what a canoe was. Now, where the carcass is, there are the vultures gathered together—and in boats, too. Yesterday they shot angry glances at us now, picture the same softened eyes with that dreamy look one sees in a kitten's when it smells frying fish. Yesterday they were lolling in the sun, a tribe of indolents. Here they are at a later phase rushing on this beef with the tense concentration of a crowd making for the refreshment-room at a station where the train stops three minutes. But do not quote too quickly against them Paul's "whose god is their belly"; do so, and you are at the bad old business of beating a cripple with his own crutches. He has got a reason, and here it comes. That is to say, such a serious chemist is this negro, that if you give him plain flour with no "relish," he will go to bed hungry rather than touch mere carbo-hydrates without the adequate albuminoids. In other words, that ravenous shriek of his you