thieves and wild beasts were frequent visitors, we began to barricade doors and windows with chairs, books, and buckets. At this moment, however, as our luggage had not yet arrived, we were safe from theft, unless we should be served as were certain members of the Universities’ Mission, who had their very coat buttons cut off. There were three other inhabited houses built on the same plan as ours, but none of them were so well furnished! While there was one efficient door in the manse, and perhaps another in the doctor’s house, the artisans’ had no doors at all, but mattings of grass were propped up in the doorways at night. Chairs were a great rarity; I do not think there were more than four in the whole station, old boxes doing duty instead. [Illustration: THE BLANTYRE MISSION.] But although our houses were only mud huts they had an English finish about them and were very acceptable to those that had wandered so long. Writing at this time I said:—“The present houses promise to last only for about three years, so that in a short time we must make brick, with a view to more permanent dwellings. Rats and white ants annoy us considerably. With the former we are constantly at war, assisted by traps, and cats, and a tame owl. Sometimes a gun is used when half-a-dozen of them may be killed by a single discharge. They are so troublesome from their great numbers, that we must try phosphorus paste or some such poison. White ants come up through the floor, and attack books or clothes, rendering them quite useless in a single night. When a person wants a skeleton for a specimen, he has only to put down the animal near these ants, and in a short time he finds nothing but the bones. Smaller ants creep everywhere. One method of placing our food out of their reach is to put it in a box suspended by a rope from the ceiling. In our house there was, by and by, an apology for a cupboard the legs of which had to be placed in water, but notwithstanding this precaution these insects made a bridge over the bodies of their drowned companions and covered our breakfast fowl in such numbers that the fowl itself actually could not be seen. One of their most annoying tricks is to visit a sleeper in bed. More terrible still are the large red ants (salau). Their attack has made many a traveller leave his bed and stand in the smoke of a fire for the remainder of the night. They bite furiously, and do not let go their hold even after the head is severed from their body. When a European happens to stand among them he has to rush into the house at once, and divest himself of all his clothing. After he has apparently destroyed all his enemies, he has some difficulty in taking their heads away from his skin. According to the natives they will kill an elephant. Entering his nostrils they cause such irritation that the animal commits suicide by dashing against trees and rocks; and then the ants enjoy the carcase. They attack their victims with much