After a perfunctory round or two you go back to the club-house veranda, where the European society of Zanzibar is seated in cane chairs, with the English illustrated weeklies, and tall glasses with ice tinkling in them. The talk is the talk of exiled white folk everywhere: the news contained in the Reuter's despatches which are posted each evening on the club bulletin-board; the condition of the ivory market; the prospects for big game-shooting under the new German game laws; the favourites for the next day's cricket match, the next week's polo game, or the next month's race meet; the latest books, the newest plays—as gathered from the illustrated weeklies; what is going to become of Smyth-Cunninghame's widow, whose husband has just died of fever; is it true that Major Buffington has been transferred from the “K. A. R.” to a line regiment; and is Germany really looking for war? That night the consul gives a dinner for you at the Zanzibar Club, where you are served by bare-footed servants immaculate in crimson turbans and white linen, and eat with solid silver from irreproachable china, in a room made almost comfortable by many swinging punkahs. After dinner you sit on the terrace in the dark, somewhere between the ocean and the stars, and over the coffee and cigars you listen to strange stories of “the Coast,” told by men who themselves played a part in them. One man tells you what Stanley really said when, after months in the jungle without seeing a white man's face, he finally stumbled on the camp of Livingstone, and how, instead of rushing up and throwing his arms around him and crying, “Saved at last, old fellow; saved at last!” he lifted his helmet at sight of the gaunt, fever-stricken man sitting in front of the tent, and said very politely, just as he would if accosting a stranger on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, “Doctor Livingstone, I believe?” Another, a wiry, bright-eyed Frenchman, with a face tanned to the colour of mahogany, tells of the days when the route from Tanganyika to the coast was marked by the bleaching skeletons of slaves, and he points out to you, across the house-tops, the squalid dwelling in which Tippoo Tib, the greatest of all the slave-traders, died. A British commissioner, the glow of his cigar lighting up his ruddy face, his scarlet cummerbund, and his white mess jacket, relates in strictest confidence a chapter of secret diplomatic history, and you learn how the German Foreign Office shattered the British dream of an all-red Cape-to-Cairo railway, and why England is so desirous of the Congo being placed under international control. A captain of the King's African Rifles holds you spellbound with a recital of the amazing exploits of the American elephant poacher, Rogers, who, jeering at the attempts of three governments to capture him, made himself, single-handed, the uncrowned king of Equatoria. Then a Danish ivory-hunter breaks in, and you hear all sorts of wild tales of life on safari, of ivory-trading