After the traveller has performed his six hundred miles from the ocean to Usiha, however phlegmatic he may be, he will surely glow with pleasure when he views this fair scene of promise. The delicious smell of cattle and young grass comes up from the plain quick, and reminds one of home-farm memories, of milk and cheese, and secret dippings into cream-pots, and from the staked bomas and the hedge-encircled villages there rise to my hearing the bleating of young calves, and the lowing of the cows as they looked interested towards the village, and I could see flocks of kids and goats, and sheep with jealously watchful shepherd-boys close by—the whole prospect so peaceful and idyllic that it made a strangely affecting impression on me. _Feb. 19._—Daybreak of the 19th of February saw the refreshed Expedition winding up and down the rolling pasture-land, escorted by hundreds of amiable natives who exchanged pleasant jests with our people, and laughed recklessly and boisterously to show us that they were glad we had visited their country. “Come yet again,” said they, as they turned to go back after escorting us three miles on our way. “Come always, and you will be welcome.” We thoroughly enjoyed marching with such a broad prospect on either hand. We felt free, and for the first time enjoyed something of the lordly feeling to which it is said man is born, but to which we had certainly been strangers between the ocean and the grassy plains of Usukuma. One half the distance, it appears to me, we had ploughed our way through the lower regions of vegetation—the dense intermeshed tangle of a full-grown jungle—or we had crawled about like an army of ants, with the ordinary grasses of the maritime lands, the Luwamberri and the Monangah plains, towering like a forest of cane above our heads. The myombo forests of Uveriveri, and wood-clad ridges—drained by the crystal-clear streams and rivulets which supply the furthest waters to Egypt’s sacred river—though tolerably open, did not inspire us with such a large, indescribable sense of freedom as the open short-grass lands in which we now found ourselves. A fair idea of the rugged rock-heaps which relieved a landscape that might otherwise have been monotonous may be obtained from the photograph of Wezi’s rocks. They are extremely picturesque from their massiveness and eccentricity, which distance increases and charms into ruined castles or antique human dwellings. Villages were numerous between Usiha and Wandui. Sweet springs bubbled from all sides, especially from the opposing bases of the granite ridges which, like walls, flank the broad natural avenue, at the upper end of which stands the capital of the king of Usiha, shaded by glorious baobab and bowery masses of milk-weed.