_Oct._—A very long march from Kagongwé in Uvinza brought us to the pleasant basin of Uhombo, remarkable for its fertility, its groves of Guinea-palms, and its beauty. This basin is about six miles square, but within this space there is scarcely a two-acre plot of level ground to be seen. The whole forms a picture of hill-tops, slopes, valleys, hollows, and intersecting ridges in happy diversity. Myriads of cool, clear streams course through, in time united by the Lubangi into a pretty little river, flowing westerly to the Luama. It was the most delightful spot that we had seen. As the people were amiable, and disposed to trade, we had soon an abundance of palm-butter for cooking, sugar-cane, fine goats and fat chickens, sweet potatoes, beans, peas, nuts, and manioc, millet and other grain for flour, ripe bananas for dessert, plantain and palm wines for cheer, and an abundance of soft, cool, clear water to drink! Subsequently we had many such pleasant experiences; but as it was the first, it deserves a more detailed description. Travellers from Africa have often written about African villages, yet I am sure few of those at home have ever comprehended the reality. I now propose to lay it before them in this sketch of a village in the district of Uhombo. The village consists of a number of low, conical grass huts, ranged round a circular common, in the centre of which are three or four fig-trees kept for the double purpose of supplying shade to the community, and bark-cloth to the chief. The doorways to the huts are very low, scarcely 30 inches high. The common fenced round by the grass huts shows plainly the ochreous colour of the soil, and it is so well trodden that not a grass blade thrives upon it. On presenting myself in the common, I attracted out of doors the owners and ordinary inhabitants of each hut, until I found myself the centre of quite a promiscuous population of naked men, women, children, and infants. Though I had appeared here for the purpose of studying the people of Uhombo, and making a treaty of friendship with the chief, the villagers seemed to think I had come merely to make a free exhibition of myself as some natural monstrosity. I saw before me over a hundred beings of the most degraded, unpresentable type it is possible to conceive, and though I knew quite well that some thousands of years ago the beginning of this wretched humanity and myself were one and the same, a sneaking disinclination to believe it possessed me strongly, and I would even now willingly subscribe some small amount of silver money for him who could but assist me to controvert the discreditable fact.