"Perfectly; and, more than that, I recognize, too, the train of thought I knew so well for two years of my life. In a few touching lines, he asks my forgiveness again for having left me so abruptly, and having dared to undertake such a journey. He left me, he says, with the intention of revisiting, for the last time, the districts he had formerly explored, and of taking a final farewell of them. According to his first idea his absence would not have been of long duration, but the exploration fever, that species of madness which draws people towards the unknown, had seized upon him, carried him away like a whirlwind, and taken him far from his intended track. I have often heard discussions upon that strange attraction to which we owe many of the discoveries made during the last half century. When once a man has tasted Africa he longs to get back to it. Livingstone passed twenty years of his life there. Mdlle. Tinne returned thither three times, and Speke was on his way back when he was accidentally shot. Baker managed to get himself made a general in the Egyptian army and secured an official appointment as the leader of an expedition, in order to give himself an excuse for seeing again the sources of the Nile he is always seeking, and the splendid lakes he loves so well. Indeed, in my own case, I will not go so far as to say that I was not impelled onward by some irresistible force, independent, perhaps, of the end I had in view. But to return to the subject—in other words, my husband's letter. "He had ascended the Nile, he writes, as far as the Gazelle River, which he thought would be completely blocked by floating vegetation, but, on the contrary, he had been able to navigate it with ease, and to reach the district of the Reks. There M. de Guéran confesses he might easily have turned back, but marvellous tales had been told him of the open districts in front of him. He could not fight against his longing, his morbid passion, his folly, whatever it may please you to call it, and he set out. He assures me that he wrote to me when with the Dinkas, the Djours, and the Niam-Niam. Not one of those letters have I ever received, and that is not to be wondered at, seeing that an accident alone has put me in possession of his last.