After we had camped, I and the guide went on ahead for an hour or two in order to prospect the morrow’s road. To my great delight I saw Doenyo Sabuk, away in the distance to the south-east, and further to the south I saw the summits of the hills behind Nairobi, which lay rather less than sixty miles away. It seemed very strange to me to reflect that I was standing in the heart of Kikuyuland amid a would-be hostile people, to all intents and purposes as far away from civilization as if I was at the North Pole, and where at any moment a dispute over a stolen sheep would resolve itself into a desperate and pitiless fight for life; while there, scarcely sixty miles away, and on this side of the range of hills which seemed so near, lay Nairobi with its houses, its railway workshops, locomotives, Baboo clerks and ticket collectors, and all the varied and busy life of a modern colonial town. During the night it rained again, and killed off some more of the sheep. We started early in the morning in the hope of reaching Maranga the same day, a hope, however, we did not realize. The A’kikuyu made themselves rather obnoxious on the road, and one or two shots were fired by our men. A calf and sheep were stolen, the thieves getting clear away with their booty into the thick bush. If we had let the matter pass we should have had further trouble on the next march, so when we camped we sent for the chief of the district. When he appeared we informed him of the circumstance, and intimated at the same time that we should like to see him stay in our camp until the stolen property was restored. This apparently did not at all coincide with his ideas, as he immediately made a dash for liberty, meanwhile shouting to his warriors, of whom there were a great number in the camp, who disappeared into the surrounding bush like shadows. We had, however, anticipated just such a move on his part, and at a signal from us, Barri, the Somali, seized the chief and secured him, and I was under the painful necessity of handcuffing him to the tent-pole and putting a sentry over him. He then took quite a different view of the case, and despatched messengers, whom we had allowed into camp for that purpose, to the people who had stolen our animals. An hour or two afterwards the messengers returned with the missing beasts, and they were handed over to us with profuse apologies. We thereupon released the chief, telling him not to do it again, though, as a matter of fact, he did not know of the theft till we ourselves so abruptly informed him of it. We could not, however, but hold him responsible for any indiscretion committed by his people. On his release, in order to show him that we bore no malice, we presented him with a bead necklace and a coloured cloth, and asked him to bring us some sweet potatoes and yams, and anything else in the vegetable line that he might wish to present to us, which he promised to do. He accordingly returned in the evening with a supply of