_Nov. 1874._—It is a most sobering employment, the organizing of an African expedition. You are constantly engaged, mind and body; now in casting up accounts, and now travelling to and fro hurriedly to receive messengers, inspecting purchases, bargaining with keen-eyed, relentless Hindi merchants, writing memoranda, haggling over extortionate prices, packing up a multitude of small utilities, pondering upon your lists of articles, wanted, purchased, and unpurchased, groping about in the recesses of a highly exercised imagination for what you ought to purchase, and cannot do without, superintending, arranging, assorting, and packing. And this under a temperature of 95° Fahr. In the midst of all this terrific, high-pressure exercise arrives the first batch of applicants for employment. For it has long ago been bruited abroad that I am ready to enlist all able-bodied human beings willing to carry a load, be they Wangwana or Wanyamwezi, Wagalla, Somali, Wasagara, Wayow, Wajindo, Wagogo, or Wazaramo. Ever since I arrived at Zanzibar, since which date I have been absent exploring the Rufiji river, I have had a very good reputation among Arabs and Wangwana. They have not forgotten that it was I who found the “old white man”—Livingstone—in Ujiji, nor that liberality and kindness to my men were my special characteristics. They have also, with the true Oriental spirit of exaggeration, proclaimed that I was but a few months absent; and that, after this brief excursion, they returned to their homes to enjoy the liberal pay awarded them, feeling rather the better for the trip than otherwise. This unsought-for reputation brought on me the laborious task of selecting proper men out of an extraordinary number of applicants. Almost all the cripples, the palsied, the consumptive, and the superannuated that Zanzibar could furnish applied to be enrolled on the muster list, but these, subjected to a searching examination, were refused. Hard upon their heels came all the roughs, rowdies, and ruffians of the island, and these, schooled by their fellows, were not so easily detected. Slaves were also refused, as being too much under the influence and instruction of their masters, and yet many were engaged of whose character I had not the least conception until, months afterwards, I learned from their quarrels in the camp how I had been misled by the clever rogues. All those who bore good characters on the Search Expedition, and had been despatched to the assistance of Livingstone, in 1872, were employed without delay. Out of these the chiefs were selected: these were, Manwa Sera, Chowpereh, Wadi Rehani, Kachéché, Zaidi, Chakanja, Farjalla, Wadi Safeni, Bukhet, Mabruki Manyapara, Mabruki Unyanyembé, Muini Pembe, Ferahan, Bwana Muri, Khamseen, Mabruki Speke, Simba, Gardner, Hamoidah, Zaidi Mganda, and Ulimengo. But before real business could be entered into, the customary present had to be distributed to each.