It was now half an hour past one o’clock, the weather perfectly good; it had rained very little that day, but threatened a showery evening; I peremptorily refused returning back to Alata, which our landlord importuned us to. He gave us a reason that he thought would have weight with us, that he, too, had his meery, or money, to send to the king, which would be ready the next morning as early as we pleased. The mention of to-morrow morning brought all my engagements and their consequences into my mind, and made me give a flat refusal, with some degree of peevishness and ill-humour. I had soon after found, that he had otherwise made up this affair with Mahomet our guide; but being resolute, and, a moment after, taking leave of our kind Shum, we were joined by Seide his eldest son, and our _English friend Drink_, each upon a mule, with two servants on foot, his father, as he said, being unwilling to spare more people, as the whole inhabitants of Alata, their neighbours and friends, intended soon to surprise Guebra Mehedin, if a feasible opportunity offered. Though we went briskly, it was past five before we arrived at Dara. Netcho had not stirred, and had procured another cow from Mahomet, of which all the strangers, and soldiers who remained, partook. Mahomet, I believe, out of kindness to me, had convinced them of the necessity of taking along with them the Shum of Alata’s money; and Netcho well knew that those who brought any part of the revenue to Ras Michael were always received kindly; and he was not interested enough in the cause to make more haste than necessary to join the king. Strates was completely cloathed, and received his sash upon my arrival. He feigned to be wonderfully hurt at my having left him behind in my excursion to the cataract. At supper I began to question him, for the first time, what had happened to him with Guebra Mehedin. “Sure, Strates, said I, you two were once friends; I have dined with you together many a time at Ayto Engedan’s, and often seen you with him in Gondar.”--“Gondar! says he, I have known him these fourteen years, when he was a child in his father Basha Eusebius’s house; he was always playing amongst us at his uncle Kasmati Eshté’s; he was just one of us; nay, he is not now twenty-six.”