Word is sent to the king of the arrival of the strangers. An escort comes inviting them to the court. The new comer quite eclipsed the village chiefs in the gorgeousness of his apparel. A huge plume of cock’s feathers surmounted an elaborately worked head-dress. A crimson robe hung about him with a grace worthy an ancient Roman, while over it was hung a snow-white goat-skin. The progress to the headquarters of the court was conducted with due pomp and circumstance. Every step Stanley’s wonderment and admiration increased; each moment he received new proofs that he had fallen among a people as different from those whom his previous wanderings had made him acquainted with as are white Americans from Choctaws. Emerging from the margin of dense forests and banana and plantain groves on the lake shores, the singular beauty of the land revealed itself to him. Wherever he turned his eyes there was a brilliant play of colors, and a boldness and diversity of outline such as he had never before seen. Broad, straight, and carefully-kept roads led through a rolling, thickly-peopled country clad in perennial green. Now the path would dive down into a hollow, where it was shaded by the graceful fronds of plantains and other tropical trees, where a stream murmured over the stones, and the air was filled with the fragrance of fruit; and then again it would crest a ridge, from whence a magnificent prospect could be obtained of the sea-like expanse of the lake, with its wooded capes and islands, the dim blue lines of the distant hills, and the fruitful and smiling country lying between, its soft, undulating outline of forest-covered valley and grassy hill sharply broken by gigantic table-topped masses of gray rocks and profound ravines. [Illustration: RUBAGA.] At length crowning the summit of a smooth hill appeared King Mtesa’s capital, Rubaga. A number of tall huts clustered around one taller than the rest from which waved the imperial standard of the Uganda. A high cane fence surrounds the court with gates opening on four broad avenues that stretch to the bottom of the hill. These are lined with fences and connected with paths shaded with groves of banana, fig and other fruit trees, and amid these groves are the houses of the commonalty. After due delay——court etiquette is even more tedious and ceremonious in Africa than Europe——Stanley is ushered into the presence of the king, seated in his great audience hall, and surrounded by a host of chiefs, warriors, pages, standard-bearers, executioners, drummers, fifers, clowns, dwarfs, wizards, medicine men, slaves and other retainers. And here we have a fine opportunity to compare the notes of two observers of the king’s receptions. Stanley had a second interview at the “royal palace,” on which occasion the king received also M. Linant De Bellefonds, sent by Gordon Pasha on a mission to Uganda. The monarch prepared a surprise for him by having Stanley by his side. But let De Bellefonds speak.