engagement, the down-porters in their proclivity to desert, and believing that it was a stranger’s duty to be even stricter than they are, I gave most stringent orders that any fugitive porter detected in my caravan should be sent back a prisoner to his employers. But the Coast-Arabs and the Wasawahili ignore this commercial chivalry, and shamelessly offer a premium to “levanters:” moreover, in these lands it is hard to make men understand the _rapport_ between sayings and doings. Seven or eight fellows, who secretly left the party, were sent back; one, however, was taken on without my knowledge. Said bin Salim persuaded the merchants to lend us the services of three Wanyamwezi, who for sums varying from eight Shukkah to two cloths, and a coil large enough to make three wire bracelets, undertook to carry packs as far as Unyanyembe. Our Ras Kafilah had increased in Uzaramo his suite by the addition of “Zawada,”--the “nice gift,” a parting present of the headman Kizaya. She was a woman about thirty, with a black skin shining like a patent-leather boot, a bulging brow, little red eyes, a wide mouth which displayed a few long, strong, scattered teeth, and a figure considerably too bulky for her thin legs, which were unpleasantly straight, like ninepins. Her _morale_ was superior to her _physique_; she was a patient and hard-working woman, and respectable in the African acceptation of the term. She was at once married off to old Musangesi, one of the donkey-men, whose nose and chin made him a caricature of our dear old friend Punch. After detecting her in a lengthy walk, perhaps not solitary, through the jungle, he was palpably guilty of such cruelty that I felt compelled to decree a dissolution of the marriage. After passing through sundry adventures she returned safely to Zanzibar, where, for aught I know, she may still grace the harem of Said bin Salim. At Inenge another female slave was added to the troop, in the person of the lady Sikujui, “Don’t know,” a “mulier nigris dignissima barris,” whose herculean person and virago manner raised her value to six cloths and a large coil of brass wire. The channel of her upper lip had been pierced to admit a disk of bone; her Arab master had attempted to correct the disfigurement by scarification and the use of rock-salt, yet the distended muscles insisted upon projecting sharply from her countenance, like a duck’s bill, or the beak of an ornithorhyncus. This truly African ornamentation would have supplied another instance to the ingenious author of “Anthropometamorphosis.”[9] “Don’t know’s” morals were frightful. She was duly espoused--as the forlorn hope of making her an “honest woman”--to Goha, the sturdiest of the Wak’hutu porters; after a week she treated him with a sublime contempt. She gave him first one, then a dozen rivals; she disordered the caravan by her irregularities; she broke every article entrusted to her charge, as the readiest way of