that would not let them come near it. Wood and Clarkson thereupon at once took their heavy old muzzle-loading elephant guns, the only weapons they possessed, and went to investigate. As they approached the carcase, Clarkson told me they could see nothing of the intruder and thought he had decamped, but when they were still some hundred and fifty yards distant, a magnificent dark-maned lion suddenly appeared from behind the dead elephant, and came rushing towards them, holding his head low between his shoulders, twitching his tail from side to side and growling savagely, and looking as if he meant to charge home. He only came on for about fifty yards however, and then stood growling, and, as my friends said, looked grand in his fury. Clarkson had dropped on his knee to get a steadier shot with his heavy elephant gun, but Wood, who was an old and very experienced hunter, said, ‘Don’t fire, Matt; let him come nearer.’ Clarkson thereupon took his gun from his shoulder and waited. Suddenly he told me the lion, after having stood for some seconds looking the picture of rage and determination not to give way, stopped growling, and turning quickly round, made a bolt through the forest, past the carcase of the elephant, just as hard as he could go. No one fired at him, as heavy elephant guns were not suitable weapons for shooting quickly at a comparatively small animal moving rapidly amongst the stems of trees, and so this lion got off scot free. He had only tried to frighten my friends away from the carcase at which he was feeding, but whether if a single unarmed man had come near him he might not have bitten him it is hard to say. During the second year of the occupation of Mashonaland, a prospector named Jones, having lost a donkey, walked out from Salisbury along the main road to look for it. Before he had proceeded far, and when he was still in sight of the huts and houses of the township, he came upon a dead donkey lying near the roadside, and thinking it might be the animal he was in search of, went to examine it, when a lioness by whom the ass had been killed, and who was lying near the carcase, sprang upon him, and seizing him by the shoulder, with her teeth dragged him to the ground, and stood over him growling. Fortunately for Mr. Jones, a young colonist named Swanapool, a lad only fourteen years of age, was at that moment coming along the road with a rifle in his hands, and he at once fired at and killed the lioness before she had inflicted any further injuries on her victim. Mr. Jones, however, had been badly bitten in the shoulder, and was an inmate of the hospital at Salisbury for some considerable time in consequence. The two anecdotes I have just related will serve to show that in Southern Africa lions do not invariably at once beat a retreat when brought face to face with man in the daytime. These cases are, however, exceptional, and it may fairly be said that, speaking generally, these great cats have a most