In the old records, which I am never tired of reading, there is a copy of a statement, made on oath, twenty-five years ago by two slaves who made their escape from an Assab pearling dhow working on the Arabian coast. In the dead of night they slipped away with the dhow's one and only boat, and were lost for days. In the last extremity of thirst and hunger they made Perim. From thence a kindly British Resident sent them on to Zeila, where they told a tale of such brutal ill-treatment at the hands of their late masters, that it called forth the practical sympathy of the officer-in-charge, who helped them in every possible way. One of these men is dead, and the other has become one of our leading petty traders. It would be considered by this latter to be the height of bad form to rake up the old story concerning his past. He likes to think that the older generation has almost forgotten his humble origin, and that the younger may in time come to believe that his children are descended from one of the old Arab sheikhs, to whom all respectable Zeilawis are related. I wonder if they are? [Illustration: A NAKHODA (CAPTAIN) AND HIS FAMILY.] The dhow captains are ever ready for an adventure, and, until recently, many came their way. Towards the end of 1916 a number of German secret service men, who had been endeavouring to stir up trouble for the allies by interfering in the politics of the ex-King of Abyssinia, Lij Yassu, and even of the Mad Mullah, determined to leave Africa, as fate was against them. One of these men walked from Abyssinia, and keeping to the French and British Somaliland border approached the coast, where he had arranged with the captain of a dhow to pick him up and take him to Arabia. But the Zeila and Djibouti police were on the look out, and acting on "information received" the dhow was arrested. Shortly afterwards the despondent German was only too glad to give himself up at Djibouti. His chance of escaping to Arabia was hopeless, and he was a lucky man to have reached the coast alive. Others of his ilk did not succeed in doing so, and it is on record that one of them perished miserably of thirst in the bush.