Surgeon Capt. Fleming is the medical officer responsible for the health of the town, and he has been instrumental in carrying out great reforms, especially in doing away with the tokuls and hovels, in which the Arabs herded together, and removing them to a special quarter outside the town. The principal feature about Suakim to-day is its remarkable water supply. In 1884 our troops had to depend on condensed sea water, supplied from an old steamer anchored in the harbor, and the town folk drew an uncertain supply from the few wells outside the town. But now Suakim never wants for water, and that of the best. She even boasts of a fountain in the little square opposite the governor's house. Engineer Mason is responsible for this state of efficiency, to which Suakim owes much of her present immunity from disease. During the last twelve years immense condensing works have been erected on Quarantine Station; but, better still, about two years ago Mr. Mason discovered an apparently inexhaustible supply near Gemaiza, about three miles from the town. There is a theory--which this water finding has made a possible fact--that as coral does not grow in fresh water, the channel which allows steamers to approach close up to the town, through her miles of coral reefs, is caused by a fresh water current running from the shore. However, on this theory Mason set to work and found a splendid supply at Fort Charter; an excavation in the khor there, about 200 feet long and 40 deep, is now an immense cistern of sweet water, the result of which the machines condensing 150 tons of water a day are now only required to produce one-half the quantity, saving the Egyptian government a considerable outlay. The natives look upon Mason as a magician, the man who turns the salt ocean into sweet water. But metal refuse, scraps of iron, old boiler plates, under his magic touch, are also turned into the most useful things. For instance, the steam hammer used in the government workshop is rigged on steel columns from the debris of an engine room of a wrecked vessel. The hammer is the crank of a disused shaft of a cotton machine, the anvil is from an old "monkey," that drove the piles for the Suakim landing stage in 1884; the two cylinders are from an effete ice machine, and the steam and exhaust pipes come from a useless locomotive of the old railway. A lathe, a beautiful piece of workmanship, is fashioned out of one of the guns found at Tamai. And the building which covers these useful implements was erected by this clever engineer in the Sirdar's service, who had utilized the rails of the old Suakim-Berber line as girders for its roof, and, in my humble opinion, this is probably the very best purpose for which they can be used. * * * * * TAPIRS IN THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN AT BRESLAU.