because then we should have been free to direct our attention to all these little points. Everything brought here was expensive owing to the carriage upon it. Most things were double the usual price, and a pound of flour or of oatmeal cost about 8d. Still we had now made a great advance nearer civilization. Brown boots had been our original outfit for Africa, now we aspired to have them blackened! At the same time we learned to look more favourably on negro civilization. At first we had a prejudice against native cooking, but now we often had the pleasure of ‘dining out’. When going to a distant place, I would order dinner at a village on my way, and ask the people to have it ready by my return. The villagers were very prompt; they went at once to the fowl-house and caught some hen that happened to be sitting on eggs, and when I came back in about two hours, I found this fowl cooked, eggs and all! The eggs proved to be young fowls too, and were consigned to the ‘boys,’ while I felt inclined to lecture the villagers on the inhumanity of taking ‘the dam’ when sitting upon eggs. The natives use an endless variety of vegetables. Being desirous to taste every sort, we asked them to cook samples for us. When any dish was more unpalatable than usual, the cook explained that he had tried to prepare it in “the white man’s way”. Often and earnestly had we to beseech them to “cook all these things in the black man’s way”! Our picnic this year was to the top of Ndilande, a mountain about four miles to the east of Blantyre. It is one of the range that runs across this district from north to south. The view from the top is most magnificent. On the south-east lofty Mlanje towers above the clouds, farther round there lies the massive form of Zomba, while Lake Chirwa stretches between them like a sheet of polished silver. To the north we see the hills of the Achipeta which some of our pupils point to as the land from which they were taken by the slave-dealer, while towards the west we descry mountains which melt into blue clouds near the banks of the broad Zambeze. As we stood on this mountain summit we were reminded that there had not been such a crowd here since the last inroad of the Mangoni when the people had all rushed to the mountain to save their lives. Many of our pupils had been in that terrible scramble. But now the cries of terror had given place to the melody of old tunes which in the days of Claverhouse had been often heard on the wild moors and mountains of Scotland. After descending we had a little rest and refreshment at one of the villages on the brow of the mountain. The party were not fatigued, for a walk of four miles and the climbing of a steep hill are nothing to an African boy! Chants were extemporised and lustily sung all the way back, the burden of them being that we had climbed Ndilande, and feasted on fowls, and would eat mutton at Blantyre!