The sound of the rifle had hardly aroused my people, for this is a country where a stray shot does not attract attention for an instant; but my shout of surprise and delight brought them quickly to their feet. Some negroes were soon fetched from the neighbouring huts, who quickly completed the work of flaying and jointing the prey. Its head alone weighed 35 pounds. The natives informed me that the Mahnya (as the Bongo call this species of antelope) are among the rarest animals of the district, although they live as much in one quarter as another. They are ordinarily found singly and far separate from any other of their kindred race; and it is said that the largest of them will assail a huntsman, and are as furious when angry as a wild buffalo. For a long time I was sorely depressed by the loss of my trusty Arslan, who had been with me ever since I left Berlin and had reached the remote wilderness. He had accompanied me through all the hardships of travel; and here I hoped that all dangers were passed, and now that the heat of the desert and the privations of water had been overcome, I had no fear of losing him; but he sank a victim to the treachery of the climate. My dog had seemed to me almost the last link that bound me to my home, and when I lost him I felt as though a bridge had been broken down which connected me with my native soil. It would have been a grief to me to lose my dog anywhere, but to lose him here was doubly sorrowful—here, amongst circumstances where he more than ever replaced the lack of a friend. Nature, pure and free, must ever be a great consoler amidst all the disappointments of life. The stillness and peace of the plant-world brought ease to my troubled mind. To that world, as I turned then, I may be permitted to return now. Nothing could more completely witness to the great variety of vegetation in my immediate neighbourhood than the fact that during my residence of five months I made a collection of almost 700 flowering plants, which I duly classified. It would not be possible in Europe during a whole year to gather so large a number if one were limited to the environs of a single town. From my own experience I am satisfied that, notwithstanding all means of intercommunication, it would be beyond the power of a botanist to secure anything like 500 species in an entire season. This would arise very much from his having to change his position, and from the varying time at which plants come into bloom: but here, in the land of the Dyoor and the Bongo, Flora seems to delight in crowding all her profusion upon the earlier months of the rainy period: the autumn is left comparatively barren, and even at the height of the rains there is little to be found which was not already in perfection some time before. [Sidenote: WOODLANDS.]