Our travellers, however, felt that they could no longer endure his impositions, and abandoning Bongo and Biselli, returned to Lake Reg. Here Alexina’s mother was seized with an illness which carried her off in a few days (July 23rd). Two European servants were also attacked by fever, and succumbed to its fatal influence. Overwhelmed with grief, Miss Tinné abandoned her schemes of African exploration, and slowly and with difficulty made her way back to Khartûm, to find that her aunt, the Baroness van Capellan, had died during her absence (in May, 1864). As soon as she had recruited her strength, she removed to Cairo, where she took up her residence, and for four years made a conspicuous figure in its brilliant European circle. The love of new scenes, however, had not been quenched by her adventures, and in her yacht she made frequent visits to Naples and Rome, Smyrna and Jaffa, Algiers and Tripoli. While at the latter port, a caravan arrived from the Sahara, with the products of the rich lands that lie beyond that famous desert. The incident suggested to her bold imagination the idea of an expedition which in romance and interest should eclipse her previous enterprise, and she traced the plan of a journey across Tripoli to the capital of Fezzan, thence to Kuka, and westward, by way of Wadai, Darfur, and Kordofan, to the Nile. As this route would carry her into the territory of the brave but treacherous Towaregs, a race to whom plunder and rapine seem the breath of life, she took care to provide herself with a sufficient escort, and on the 29th of January, 1869, set out from Tripoli at the head of a troop of fifty armed men. At Sokna, in Fezzan, which she reached on the 1st of March, she engaged the services of a Towareg chief, one Ik-nu-ken; but at the last moment he failed her, and she accepted as guides two chiefs of the same tribe, who professed to have been sent by Ik-nu-ken. These men, in conjunction with her attendant, Mohammed, a Tunisian, resolved upon murdering her in order to gain possession of her money and valuables. Soon after her departure from Sokna (it was on the 1st of August) they excited a quarrel among the camel-drivers, and when Alexina quitted her tent to ascertain the cause, one of the Towaregs shot her with a rifle-bullet, mortally wounding her. For four and twenty hours she lay dying at the door of her tent, no one venturing to offer assistance or consolation. Such was the melancholy fate of Alexina Tinné! It is satisfactory to know that the murderers who, with their plunder, had escaped into the interior, were eventually captured, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment for life. {259} MR. J. A. MACGAHAN, AND CAMPAIGNING ON THE OXUS. I. MR. J. A. MACGAHAN, as special correspondent for the _New York Herald_, a journal well known by the liberality and boldness of its management, accompanied the Russian army, under General Kauffmann, in its campaigns in Central Asia in 1873 and 1874.