_Dec. 25._—The following sketch is a portion of a private letter to a friend, written on Christmas Day at Zingeh: “I am in a centre-pole tent, seven by eight. As it rained all day yesterday, the tent was set over wet ground, which, by the passing in and out of the servants, was soon trampled into a thick pasty mud bearing the traces of toes, heels, shoe nails, and dogs’ paws. The tent walls are disfigured by large splashes of mud, and the tent corners hang down limp and languid, and there is such an air of forlornness and misery about its very set that it increases my own misery, already great at the sight of the doughy muddy ground with its puddlets and strange hieroglyphic traceries and prints. I sit on a bed raised about a foot above the sludge, mournfully reflecting on my condition. Outside, the people have evidently a fellow feeling with me, for they appear to me like beings with strong suicidal intentions or perhaps they mean to lie still, inert until death relieves them. It has been raining heavily the last two or three days, and an impetuous downpour of sheet rain has just ceased. On the march, rain is very disagreeable; it makes the clayey path slippery, and the loads heavier by being saturated, while it half ruins the cloths. It makes us dispirited, wet, and cold, added to which we are hungry—for there is a famine or scarcity of food at this season, and therefore we can only procure half-rations. The native store of grain is consumed during the months of May, June, July, August, September, October, and November. By December, the planting month, there is but little grain left, and for what we are able to procure, we must pay about ten times the ordinary price. The natives, owing to improvidence, have but little left. I myself have not had a piece of meat for ten days. My food is boiled rice, tea, and coffee, and soon I shall be reduced to eating native porridge, like my own people. I weighed 180 lbs. when I left Zanzibar, but under this diet I have been reduced to 134 lbs. within thirty-eight days. The young Englishmen are in the same impoverished condition of body, and unless we reach some more flourishing country than famine-stricken Ugogo, we must soon become mere skeletons. “Besides the terribly wet weather and the scarcity of food from which we suffer, we are compelled to undergo the tedious and wearisome task of haggling with extortionate chiefs over the amount of black-mail which they demand, and which we must pay. We are compelled, as you may perceive, to draw heavy drafts on the virtues of prudence, patience, and resignation, without which the transit of Ugogo, under such conditions as above described, would be most perilous. Another of my dogs, ‘Nero,’ the retriever, is dead. Alas! all will die.”