When I engaged the Watonga on Lake Nyassa, I informed them of all the salient features that they would see on the road, such as lakes, mountains that spat fire, mountains so high that the water became as stones, etc. As we passed each of these features I reminded them of what I had said, showing them that I had not lied, as they had imagined before starting. When the journey was nearly finished, I pointed out that everything had appeared as I had said, and asked them what they thought of it. Then spake the headman: "Lord, you are a wonderful lord. You told us of the four lakes, and how many days’ journey it would take to pass them; you told us of the smoking mountains and the great mountains of the white water; of the elephants and the meat with necks like trees (giraffe); yet you have not been there before, as we well know. And as you would not have us, your servants, think you a liar, _you put them there_." Again, I had told them of the size of the white man’s houses; and when we arrived at Khartoum I showed them the palace as an example. They smiled and said: "Yes, it is very wonderful; but that is no house, _it has been dug out of a hill_." When travelling up the Zambesi, I gave Sharp’s Somali boy a Van Houten’s cocoa-tin to open, telling him to make cocoa. He disappeared for a time, and returned with a tin-opener with which he proceeded to tear off the bottom of the tin. Having successfully accomplished this, he thrust a spoon in and pushed the lid off, with the result that all the cocoa fell out on to the ground. Then he looked at me with an expression of supreme contempt, as though to say: "I always thought the white men fools, but not quite such fools as to make a thing like that." He must have opened hundreds of tins before, both hermetically sealed ones and ordinary ones. Yet to this day he thinks me an idiot. The small boy who was responsible for arranging my tent had been carefully instructed always to place my belongings in a certain order. Occasionally, through his having put my bed on an uneven piece of ground, I would tell him to change it to the other side, which meant reversing my boxes and table to bring them into the correct relative position. In doing this he was never satisfied till he had also reversed the square mat, and when I laughed at him for doing so he left the mat and put the boxes wrong, nor could he put them right till he had reversed the mat. This was most curious, and I could never grasp to my satisfaction what his train of reasoning was. One day, when hauling a canoe up a very shallow tributary of the Nile, one of my boys, finding that he could not pull to advantage from the bed of the river, climbed inside and made superhuman efforts to drag it along. He quite failed to see the cause of my laughter, sulked, and refused to pull any more.