the first time in Africa, he beheld a cane settee. The men carrying the boat did not come up for two days, and then quite broken and disheartened. Indeed, here almost at the very outset, everything seemed to point to an early dissolution of the expedition. Not only were his men discontented, but Tipo-tipo, with all his elegance of manner and pompous pretence, began to glower and grumble, not merely at the hardships his people were compelled to encounter, but because sickness had broken out in his camp. On the 13th, three hundred out of the seven hundred of his men branched off from the expedition. The marching now became not only monotonous but extremely painful, and so slow that it took a whole day's march to make a distance of nine miles--a rate of progress that Stanley saw very clearly would never bring him to the Atlantic Ocean. They had now been seven days on the march and had made but about forty miles, and scarcely _one_ mile west. Thus far their course had been almost due north toward the great desert of Sahara, and not toward the Atlantic Ocean. These five days had been utterly thrown away, so far as progress in the right direction was concerned; not an inch had been gained, and the whole expedition was discouraged. The carriers of the boat begged Stanley to throw it away or go back to Nyangwe, while the Arab chiefs made no attempt to conceal their discontent, but openly expressed their disinclination to proceed any farther. Even the splendid barbarian dandy, Tipo-tipo, who prided himself on his superiority to all other Arabs, began to look moody, while increasing sickness in the camp cast additional gloom over it. Huge serpents crossed their path, while all sorts of wild beasts and vermin peopled the dense forest and swarmed around them.