“You will be delighted to hear that there is a _doctor_ here, who is going to accompany me in my walk, and is a great stickler for comforts. He was, I think, doctor on a steamer, and at last got to the Diamond Fields, and thence came here with Westbeach, and has been here now two years. He spends a good portion of his time in collecting beetles, and is apparently very good-natured. He never loses an opportunity of telling you that a thing is very unwholesome, the next thing being its rapid disappearance into his own interior. There was a grand plum-pudding made here on Christmas Day. Besides Blockley and the doctor there are two traders, who arrived here after I did, on their way from the Zambesi. One has been ill and the doctor prohibited him plum-pudding, so there were four of us in all. We ate nothing but pudding on Christmas Day and the day following, with scarcely an exception. The men had another pudding. My man turns out to have been originally a cook, and when he likes can cook well. The doctor was found to be five pounds heavier after dinner than before it on Christmas Day. He strongly urged upon all of us the desirability of moderation, but no one seemed to pay much attention to him, and he certainly did not practise what he preached. He has been to the Falls before, and in the rainy season too, so he knows what he is undertaking in going with me. I expect he will make very slow marches, but so much the better. I am going to take with me the identical tent I had with me in America, and which proved so effectual a shelter from the snows of the Rocky Mountains. There was a grand idea in the doctor’s mind of taking a lot of cold plum-pudding with us on our walk, but the last morsel disappeared last night. However, we shall not be badly off for supplies. “From Tamasancha, where I last wrote to you,[59] and where the traders were waiting till April, I was nine days in getting here. The waggon-road all the way goes through thick bush and heavy sand. There are no rivers, but abundance of pools in the rainy season. We have not had very much rain, but of course enough to fill the pools, and enough to make the road, where it goes through turf, as it does before reaching this place, extremely heavy. My waggon stuck the night of my arrival, but Blockley brought his oxen and helped me out; which, however, he failed to accomplish that night, though succeeding the morning following. He then brought my waggon up here on to the top of a little hill where his house is, close to which it is now drawn up.