And with it the sound of the drum, the everlasting drum; stimulus to labour, spirit of the dance, dirge at the death-bed, call to the feast, frenzy-lasher at the religious ceremonial, medium of converse, warner of peril, bearer of news, telephone and telegraph in one. Go where you will, you cannot escape the drum—where human life is. The everlasting drum which heralds the setting sun, which ushers in the morn, which troubles your sleep and haunts your dreams. Borne across the silent waters, booming through the sombre forest, rising from the murmuring town, cheering on the railway cutters—the fascinating, tedious, mysterious, maddening, attractive, symbolic, inevitable, everlasting African drum. * * * * * I suppose they must be thirsty like every other living thing in the glare of the sun and the heat of the sky and the dust of the track, for they crowd thick and fast about the _kurimi_, the narrow belt of vegetation (a blessed sight in the “dries”) where the stream cuts the road. _Pieridæ_ with white and yellow wings; _Lycaenæ_ shot with amethyst and azure; _Theklas_, too, or what I take for such, with long, fragile, waving extremities, infinitely beautiful. Now and then a black and green _Papilio_, flashing silver from his under wing, harbinger of spring. Or some majestic, swift-flying _Charaxes_ with broad and white band on a centre of russet brown—not the _castor_, alas! nor yet the _pollux_—I have yet to live to see _them_ afloat ’neath the African sun. Narrow veins of muddy ooze trickle from the well-nigh dried-up bed. And here they congregate in swarms, proboscis thrust into the nectar, pumping, pumping up the liquid, fluttering and jostling one another for preferential places even as you may see the moths do on the “treacles” at home. The butterfly world is much like the human world after all in its egotism. But if you want to see it at its best, plunge into the cool forest glades before the sun has attained his _maximum_ (when even the butterflies rest) and watch the green and gold _Euphædra_ dodging in and about the broad green leaves or tangled creepers. See him spread his glorious panoply where that fitful sunbeam has somehow managed to pierce the vault. A sight for the dear gods, I tell you—is the _Euphædra_ sunning himself on a Niger forest path. Men and politics become as small fry. The right perspective asserts itself. You almost forget the beastly, clogging, mentally muddling helmet (how the Almighty has blessed the African by granting him a thick skull which he can carry on his neck, shaved—shaved, mind you (the bliss of it even in thought!),—and as clean as a billiard ball at that) as you watch the _Euphædra_, and absorb the countless other delights the forest contains, foremost amongst them silence, silence from humans at least. “These are the best days of my life. These are my golden days.” * * * * *