miles of heathen round him, and in a short time he will be their king, their lawgiver, and their judge. I asked my men one day the question point blank--"Why do you not kill me and take my guns and clothes and beads?" "Oh," they replied, "we would never kill a spirit." Their veneration for the white man indeed is sometimes most affecting. When war is brewing, or pestilence, they kneel before him and pray to him to avert it; and so much do they believe in his omnipotence that an unprincipled man by trading on it, by simply offering pins, or buttons or tacks, or pieces of paper, or anything English, as charms against death, could almost drain a country of its ivory--the only native wealth. The real dangers to a traveller are of a simpler kind. Central Africa is the finest hunting country in the world. Here are the elephant, the buffalo, the lion, the leopard, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the hyæna, the eland, the zebra, and endless species of small deer and antelope. Then the whole country is covered with traps to catch these animals--deep pits with a jagged stake rising up in the middle, the whole roofed over with turf and grass, so exactly like the forest bed that only the trained eye can detect their presence. I have found myself walking unconsciously on a narrow neck between two of these pits, when a couple of steps to either side would almost certainly have meant death. Snakes too, and especially the hideous and deadly puff adder, may turn up at any moment; and in bathing, which one eagerly does at every pool, the sharpest lookout is scarcely a match for the diabolical craft of the crocodile. _13th October_.--Walking through the forest to-day some distance ahead of my men, I suddenly came upon a rhinoceros. The creature--the rhino is solitary in his habits--was poking about the bush with its head down and did not see me, though not ten yards separated us. My only arms were a geological hammer and a revolver, so I had simply to lie down and watch him. Presently my gun-bearer crawled up, but unfortunately by this time the pachyderm had vanished, and was nowhere to be found. I broke my heart over it at the moment, though why in the world I should have killed him I do not in the least know now. In cold blood one resents Mr. Punch's typical Englishman--"What a heavenly morning! let's go and kill something!" but in the presence of temptation one feels the veritable savage.