travelling is enjoyable: great indeed is their contrast with the normal features--bald glaring fields, fetid bush and grass, and monotonous expanses of dull dead herbage, concealing swamps and water-courses, hedged in by vegetation whose only varieties are green, greener, and greenest. In these favoured places the traveller appears surrounded by a thick wood which he never reaches, the trees thinning out as he advances. On clear and sunny days the scenery is strange and imposing. The dark-red earth is prolonged half-way up the tree-trunks by the ascending and descending galleries of the termite: contrasting with this peculiarly African tint, the foliage, mostly confined to the upper branches, is of a tender and lively green, whose open fret-work admits from above the vivid blue or the golden yellow of an unclouded sky. In the basins where water is nearer the surface, and upon the banks of water-courses and rivulets, the sweet and fertile earth produces a rich vegetation, and a gigantic growth of timber, which distinguishes this region from others further west. Usagara is peculiarly the land of jungle-flowers, and fruits, whose characteristic is a pleasant acidity, a provision of nature in climates where antiseptics and correctives to bile are almost necessaries of life. They are abundant, but, being uncultivated, the fleshy parts are undeveloped. In the plains, the air, heavy with the delicious perfume of the jasmine (_Jasminum Abyssinicum?_), with the strong odour of a kind of sage (_Salvia Africana_, or _Abyssinica_?), and with the fragrant exhalations of the mimosa-flowers, which hang like golden balls from the green clad boughs, forms a most enjoyable contrast to the fetid exhalations of the Great Dismal Swamps of the lowlands. The tamarind, everywhere growing wild, is a gigantic tree. The Myombo, the Mfu’u, the Ndábi, and the Mayágeá, a spreading tree with a large fleshy red flower, and gourds about eighteen inches long and hanging by slender cords, are of unusual dimensions; the calabash is converted into a hut; and the sycomore, whose favourite habitat is the lower counterslope of Usagara, is capable of shading a regiment. On the steep hill-sides, which here and there display signs of cultivation and clearings of green or sunburnt grass, grow parachute-shaped mimosas, with tall and slender trunks, and crowned by domes of verdure, rising in tiers one above the other, like umbrellas in a crowd.