specimen of his skill raised their astonishment to the highest pitch: they were almost convulsed and thrown into a delirium. They danced and capered around the bellows, each tried them in turn, and they clapped their hands the better to testify their joy. They begged him to make them a present of this wonderful machine and seemed to wait for his answer with impatience, not imagining that he would readily give up so valuable a piece of furniture. To their extreme satisfaction he granted their request, and they undoubtedly yet preserve a remembrance of that stranger who first supplied them with the most essential instrument of metallurgy. [Illustration] [Illustration] PART X INCIDENTS OF PERSONAL PERIL AND DISCOMFORT OF TRAVELLERS AND EXPLORERS. CHAPTER XXV. A night’s lodging at Brass--Delightful bedfellows--Sleeping out on the Gambia--“Voices of the Night”--Lodging “up a tree”--Half a cigar for supper--The “leafy couch” abandoned--The bright side of the picture--Dr. Livingstone no washerwoman--An alarming “camping out” incident--The terrible tsetse--The camp in the wilderness--The privileges and perquisites of a Pagazi--No finery worn on the road--Recreation on the march--Daily life of an Eastern African--His sports and pastimes--Approaching a cannibal shore. It may be safely asserted that, as a rule, the inhabitants of all civilized countries “who live at home at ease” have but a very inadequate notion of the pains and penalties endured by those explorers and adventurers whose pleasure or business it is to undertake pilgrimages more or less perilous, and on whom the said easyliving folk are dependent for all their knowledge of the ways and means of peoples barbarous and remote. Nor is it very surprising that it should be so. First of all comes in the traveller’s delicacy and disinclination to parade his personal affairs (which for by far the greater part mean his discomforts and dangers and sicknesses) in a narrative exclusively concerning other people and things, only in as far as he is associated with them in a manner too intimate for his presence to be ignored. Nor will the selfish book-buyer tolerate the adoption of any other course; it is the mysteries revealed, and not the medium revealing them, that he takes an interest in, and in most cases cares as little for the personal sensations of traveller Brown or Robinson as that the leather casing of his telescope is incommoded by the heat while he is making solar observations. Even in the case of the humane reader, there is danger that the interest excited by a book of wonders, savage or otherwise, will shut the author from his consideration from the time of scanning the title-page to the perusal of the last line. With this view of the matter before us some small measure of justice may be effected and the reader at the same time be