Gobayze; while bargaining with natives would have been much more in accordance with Mr. Munzinger’s experience and powers. Some tobacco has come up, and has been distributed among the troops, to their great satisfaction. During the last few days the troops have been exercised in turning out rapidly on the alarm being sounded. The sentries have, too, been placed and instructed as if in front of an enemy, who might at any moment make a night attack. The natives here unanimously express their hopes and wishes that we should take possession of the country and become their masters. Our style of paying for everything we require has taken them entirely by surprise. It is altogether contrary to their experience. There is no doubt that they are extremely poor, and terribly ground down, and many of their very numerous vices are, to a certain extent, excusable upon this score. They are so poor that they will sell anything for dollars—their corn, their flour, their donkeys, their cattle, their wives, or their daughters. They are a terribly priest-ridden people. I should say that no people in the world pay such extortionate dues. The priests claim two-fifths of the gross produce; of the remainder one-third is claimed by the King; then comes the local chief: so that finally the unfortunate cultivator gets less than one-fifth of the crop he has raised. It is no wonder that the people are poor, and that in times of drought, or when the locusts sweep over the land, or the rebels, more destructive still, carry off crops and herds and flocks, famine stalks through the land. There is no doubt that our mastership would be an unmixed blessing to them, but it would certainly be the very reverse of advantageous to ourselves. From our landing at Zulla to the present time we have passed through a country more barren than any I ever traversed. Except for grazing purposes it is absolutely valueless. Here and there, in the valleys, are little patches of cultivation by the side of the streams; but in the whole two hundred miles we have passed through, looking east and west as far as the eye can reach, I do not think that we have seen, in all, five hundred acres of cultivated land. Taking the two hundred miles north and south by, say, ten miles east and west—in all, two thousand square miles—I would not take the fee-simple as a gift. I am not, of course, suggesting that the ground we have traversed is to be taken as a fair sample of Abyssinia. Unquestionably it is not so. It would be as fair to land in the north of England, and to skirt the sea-coast, keeping on the Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, Welsh, and Cornwall hills, and then to pronounce England a sterile country. Still, by what we have seen, by the ranges of mountain-summits discernible everywhere in the far west, it is evident that a very large portion of Abyssinia is mere grazing-land; and it is probable that the valleys and low-lying plains, which are extremely