I was again in Ghattas’s Seriba on the 13th of May. The arrival of an ivory caravan on its return journey had brought an unwonted animation. But for me very soon the ordinary routine of life came back, and one day passed on just like another in the closest intercourse with Nature. Except during some temporary excursions to the Bongo, this Seriba would be my residence for some months to come, and I set to work to make my quarters as comfortable as I could in a good-sized hut which had been vacated for me. The first thing I did was to lay out a large vegetable garden, a task which engaged not only all my own people, but gave occupation to not a few of the black slaves of the place. I had not only brought with me a good supply of pickaxes and spades, but I had likewise a capital collection of seeds. Thus I hoped at once to provide for my own necessities, and to prove to the natives the productiveness of their soil. The plot of ground was nearly 200 paces square, and the next thing was to enclose it with a hedge of straw, and to lay it out with a series of parallel beds. The larger number of these beds I planted with the best sorts of maize, of which I had procured the original ears from New Jersey. Seventy days after sowing I reaped the crop, and the ingathering did not simply answer ray highest expectations, but surpassed in quality the original stock; the kinds which seemed to succeed best being those which after they are dry are horny and transparent. Tobacco from Maryland grew to an immense height, and I gathered several hundredweights of it. There was not altogether so much of a deficiency of tobacco in the country as of the larger leaves, of which use could be made for rolling into cigars. In Egypt the Virginian tobacco can be made to grow leaves as large as the palm of one’s hand, but in the negro districts the whole produce is quite diminutive. Negroes always sow tobacco under cover before they plant it out; the midday sun of Central Africa is too powerful for the seed, which infallibly perishes in a parched soil. I had always to guard against the same difficulty with all my European vegetables, especially in July, or at other times, when five or six days without a drop of rain would come in succession, and I only saved my young sprouts by having water brought twice a day by the women in their great pitchers. Worms did a vast amount of mischief amongst the germinating seeds, and no devastator was more destructive than the great millipede (_Spirostreptus_), which, as long and thick as my finger, penetrated the soil in every direction. The havoc made in this way amongst the beans before they were set was very considerable. [Sidenote: GARDEN VEGETABLES.]