"Male humanity is divided into two classes--the men who dress for dinner, and the men who don't. I have always belonged to the latter half. We are the freemen; our shoulders have never bent under the yoke. I ran away from every school I was ever sent to. I played Hell and Tommy at my private tutor's Berkshire parsonage--set fire to his study when he locked me in, with an order to construe five tough pages of 'Thicksides,' for insubordination. I set fire to his waste-paper basket, lads, and his missus's muslin curtains. I knew I could put the fire out with his garden-hose, when I had given him a good scare; and after that little bit of arson, he was uncommonly glad to get rid of me. The old Herod had insisted on my dressing for dinner every night--putting on a claw-hammer coat and a white tie to eat barley-broth and boiled mutton. I wasn't going to stop in such a _bouge_ as that. Then came the university. I was always able to scramble through an exam., so I matriculated with flying colours--passed my Little Go with a flourish of trumpets; and my people hoped I had turned over a new leaf. So I had, boys--a new leaf in a new book. I had begun to read the story of African travel--Livingstone, Burton, Baker, du Chaillu, Stanley. And from that hour I knew what manner of life I was meant for. I got my kind old dad to give me a biggish cheque--compounded with him, before my second term at Trinity was over, for the fifteen hundred my university career would have cost him--and sailed for the Cape; and from that day to this, except when I read a paper one night in Savile Row, I have never worn the garment of the white slave. I have never thrust these hairy arms of mine into the silk-lined sleeves of a swallow-tail coat." * * * * * For the eldest traveller those days before the coming of the Masika left nothing to be desired. The long coasting voyages on the great fresh-water sea, the canoes following the romantic shores or threading the southern archipelago where the river Lofu pours its broad stream into the lake, were enough for exercise, excitement, variety.