The mosquitoes here defy description; even at mid-day I had to eat my food walking about, and my evening and morning toilet, combined as it was with a Dan Lenoesque extravaganza, if performed on the Empire stage would assuredly have brought down the house. I crawled into my mosquito-net with the greatest caution, disposed all my weighty belongings, such as boots and cartridge-bags, in a circle round my bed to keep down the edges of the net, exhausted all my candle-ends in exploding the odd hundred or two that had crawled in with me, and was quickly lulled to sleep by the dismal drone of myriads, happy in the knowledge that they were outside; sleep, gentle sleep, during which I evolved in one short hour from my own insignificant self through the alarming stages of Daniel in the lion’s den, and a cold bread poultice, to the stern reality that they were inside; and they were, hundred and hundreds of them. In vain I searched for some hole or possible inlet, and eventually had to resign myself to the inevitable, buoyed up by the meagre consolation that I had discovered that, like the light of the glow-worm, the mosquito is possessed of the properties of the Röntgen rays. Early the next morning Tunja came to tell me that Katonzi was coming back, and at midday he arrived in person. He is a dismal old nigger, and though somewhat rapacious, not a bad fellow. His first request was to see the wonderful book, and then how I struck a match, an accomplishment that tickled him immensely. He then naïvely asked me to give him my guns, saying that Lugard had given them two guns, but that the Belgians had taken them away. I asked him why all the people were so frightened, and where they had all gone; whereupon he proceeded to recount the same tales of misery and oppression that I had heard the day before, from which I gathered that a Congo Free State official rejoicing in the name of "Billygee" had suddenly swooped down on the country a year ago, and after shooting down numbers of the natives had returned west, carrying off forty young women, numerous children, and all the cattle and goats, and putting a finishing touch to the proceedings by a grand pyrotechnic display, during which they bound the old women, threw them into the huts, and then fired the roofs. Several absolutely independent witnesses informed me that this had been done actually in the presence of Billygee and the gentlemen who accompanied him. Katonzi’s two sons, Tunja and Kutaru, were bound and taken away, but released after two months. Kavalli’s eldest son is now in their hands, while a younger one escaped to the Balegga. As I have mentioned before, when in Mboga the Balegga told me similar tales; here I was repeatedly given accounts that tallied in all essentials, and further north the Wakoba made the same piteous complaints; and I saw myself that a country apparently well populated and responsive to just treatment in Lugard’s