_15th to 22d October_.--This camp is so well situated that I have spent the week in it. The programme is the same every day. At dawn Jingo came to my tent with early coffee. Went out with my gun for a morning stroll, and returned in an hour for breakfast. Thereafter I sorted the specimens captured the day before, and hung up the fatter insects to dry in the sun. Routing the ants from the boxes and provision stores was also an important and vexatious item. Some ants are so clever that they can break into every thing, and others so small that they will crawl into anything; and between the clever ones, and the small ones, and the jam-loving ones, and the flour-eating ones and the specimen-devouring ones, subsistence, not to say science, is a serious problem. The only things that have hitherto baffled them are the geological specimens; but I overhaul these regularly every morning along with the rest, in terror of one day finding some precocious creature browsing off my granites. After these labors I repaired to a natural bower in the dry bed of a shaded streamlet, where I spent the entire day. Here, even at high noon, was perfect coolness, and rest, and solitude unutterable. I lay among birds and beasts and flowers and insects, watching their ways, and trying to enter into their unknown lives. To watch uninterruptedly the same few yards of universe unfold its complex history; to behold the hourly resurrection of new living things, and miss no change or circumstance, even of its minuter parts; to look at all, especially the things you have seen before, a hundred times, to do all with patience and reverence--this is the only way to study nature. Towards the afternoon the men began to drop in with their boxes of insects, each man having to collect a certain number every camp-day. If sufficient were not brought in the delinquent had to go back to the bush for more. At five or six I went back to my tent for dinner, and after an hour over the camp-fire turned in for the night. The chattering of the men all round the tent usually kept me awake for an hour or two. Their merriest time is just after sunset, when the great ufa-feast of the day takes place. The banter between the fires is kept up till the small hours, and the chief theme of conversation is always the white man himself--what the whit man did, and what the white man said, and how the white man held his gun, and everything else the white man thought, looked, willed, wore, ate, or drank. My object in being there was an insoluble riddle to them, and for what witchcraft I collected all the stones and insects was an unending source of speculation.