"No? Well: sit down. You ought to rest your leg. Lucy didn’t want you to know. She thought it would upset you so—And indeed, it was a shocking pity.... But you’d soon have noticed how few there are left—even from here on a clear day.... I understand Stolzenberg sent a huge consignment of their plumage to a firm he trades with in Marseilles. And he has been going about to other lakes doing the same. But I must stick to the point.... Where was I? Oh, yes! ... Ann, who lives in our old station at Mwada, was awfully upset because she had become so fond of these birds, besides being infuriated at Stolzenberg’s Ruga-ruga occasionally carrying off women. So she wrote him a letter saying that if he showed himself in the Concession again she would take a gun to him herself. She solemnly cursed him and called down Divine punishment on his head. Unfortunately—for I think the whole thing was _most_ unwise—she paid a Masai who came along to trade to deliver the letter at Stolz’s boma. The watchman at the gate made him come in and give the letter himself, and Stolz having read it had the man’s left hand chopped off, tied it to his right, and said that was the answer to the English Missionaries and that was how he’d treat any other messengers sent to him.... The poor wretch arrived at Mwada a week afterwards nearly dead with loss of blood.... Of course, the Masai have again sworn vengeance against this monster: but what can they do? But that is not our worst trouble. Before you went, and whilst you were away, Ann took up the sex question. You know how set she was on the elevation of the native women? You used to laugh about her corps of Amazons, her ’Big-geru.’ She hadn’t been long with us before she began to interest herself in the young women of Iraku.... Those of the Wambugwe are, I must confess, _hopeless_ at present; I mean as regards chastity. Poor things! They are corrupted and degraded from childhood. But there is something superior—something of another race in the Iraku and Fiome. You said once they were partly descended from some Gala immigration of long ago?... "Well, Ann, who is untirable, started a class of these Iraku young women before she had been six months in the Happy Valley. The chiefs—I dare say you remember speaking to some of them? ... _quite_ approved and sent their young daughters. She taught them cooking and laundry work, plain sewing, reading and writing. And now she finds, after they have been a year or two at our schools, they go off and live with white men....!" _Roger_: "I dare say they do, and have a much better time with them than with their own men. But what white men? German, I suppose?..."