I have been so long looking forward to arriving at Attegrat, that, being here, I feel that I have made a long stage into the interior of Abyssinia. I confess, however, that I am disappointed in Attegrat. It is foolish, I own. I ought by this time to have learnt the utter hollowness and emptiness of all statements connected with the country; and everything we have been told, everything we have been led to expect, has alike turned out utterly incorrect. Sometimes we have been told pleasant things, sometimes we have been threatened with dire calamities; but in both cases the vaticinations have turned out equally incorrect. Guinea-worms and tape-worms, fever and cholera, small-pox and dysentery, tetse-fly and sunstroke—all these have been distinguished by their absence: but as a counterbalance, so have Colonel Phayre’s green fields and gushing springs at Zulla, his perennial water between Sooro and Rayray Guddy, and his emporium of commerce at Senafe, which turned out a village of six mud-huts. Still, in spite of previous disappointments, I confess I clung to the idea that I should find a town of considerable size at Attegrat. The place was marked in Roman capitals upon the maps. It had been spoken of as a town flowing with milk and honey; it was to be one of our main halting-places; and altogether one certainly did expect to find rather more than twenty hovels, a barn called a church, and another ruinous barn which was once a palace. But before I describe Attegrat, let me detail my journey here from Goun-Gonna. I sent my baggage off at seven o’clock in the morning, at the same time that the baggage of the head-quarters of the 33d and Colonel Penn’s battery of mountain guns started. I then explored the pretty valley I described in my last, and afterwards went into a friend’s tent and finished my letter to you. At twelve o’clock I started for what I was told was an eleven miles’ ride; but it turned out the longest sixteen I have ever ridden. Every officer and man to whom I have spoken—and among others I may quote Colonel Milward and Colonel Penn of the Artillery, and Major Cooper, and all the officers of the 33d—agreed with me that it was over sixteen miles. Colonel Phayre’s and the quartermaster’s departments’ gross miscalculation of distances is becoming a very serious nuisance. It is absolutely cruel upon the men. If soldiers are told that they have a sixteen miles’ march across a rough country, and beneath a hot sun, they will do the distance. It may be hard work; but they know when they start what is before them, and they make up their minds to it. But when they are told it is eleven miles, at the end of that distance they begin to look out anxiously for their camping-place. They become cross and impatient, and are infinitely more fatigued than they would have been had they been told the real distance that was before them.