With the exception of one or two slight fracas with my boys, they were well-behaved, and I bought a large supply of fish; but the second day about fifteen hundred turned up, and having nothing to sell, became very obstreperous. They tried to steal, so I ordered the vicinity of my tent to be cleared, and hustled several fairly roughly. One turned on me, and I knocked him down, cutting my hand badly on his teeth. They took my rough handling very well, but immediately resented any movement of my boys, and one silly young blood danced a dangerous war-dance, brandishing his spear round one of my Askaris, till I broke it for him, and gave him two or three reminders with a heavy hippo-whip. They then became very much excited, and I spent the rest of the afternoon with my hand on my revolver, momentarily expecting a general _émeute_, when, no doubt, we should have fared badly. Fortunately, there were two respectable old gentlemen who did their best to keep the younger blades quiet. One man bolted with a bit of cloth; a miss-fire from my .303 saved his life, and one of the old gentlemen, not knowing that I had pulled the trigger, signed to me to hold, and had the cloth fetched back; he then succeeded in clearing the camp of about half the turbulent rabble, for which I was very thankful. They then began to slowly file off, but about a hundred, including some of the most noisy ruffians, remained; these I quickly cleared with a heavy whip in one hand and my revolver in the other. They did not like the whip and smiled at the revolver, evidently thinking it a sort of club, till I shot a confiding marabout which was watching the proceedings, when there was a race for first place to less dangerous quarters. On the march we came upon a belated hippo out on the plain, and there was a great hunt, about two hundred natives chasing him and plunging their spears into his body, till at last, covered with blood, he turned to bay, when I finished him off with a shot in the head. A few miles further on I shot a Senegal hartebeeste, which gave us a supply of meat. On the third day we succeeded in shaking off our too attentive friends, and although we marched for six hours only made seven miles, owing to the necessity of feeling one’s way round the swamps and the difficult nature of the ground. In many places the burnt vegetation was of the consistency of coke, and severely cut my boys’ feet. The plain still widened, and the Gertrude Nile tended more decidedly towards the west. The bush was no longer visible, but to the west of the swamps there appeared to be a slight ridge with a dense covering of borassus.