Ten days' languid steaming from Zanzibar brings the traveller to the Zambesi mouth. The bar here has an evil reputation, and the port is fixed on a little river which flows into the Indian Ocean slightly to the north, but the upper reaches of which almost join the Zambesi at some distance inland. This port is the Portuguese settlement of Quilimane, and here I said good-bye to the steamer and to civilization. Some distance in the interior stands a solitary pioneer Mission station of the Established Church of Scotland, and still farther in, on Lake Nyassa, another outpost of a sister church. My route led past both these stations, and I had the good fortune to pick up on the way two or three young fellow-countrymen who were going up to relieve the mission staff. For the latter part of my journey I was quite alone. All African work, as a rule, is done single-handed. It is not always easy to find a companion for such a project, and the climate is so pestilential that when two go, you and your friend are simply nursing each other time about, and the expedition never gets on. On the whole, however, the solitary course is not to be commended. An unutterable loneliness comes over one at times in the great still forests, and there is a stage in African fever--and every one must have fever--when the watchful hand of a friend may make the difference between life and death. After leaving Quilimane, the first week of our journey up the Qua-qua was one long picnic. We had two small row-boats, the sterns covered with a sun-proof awning, and under these we basked, and talked, and read and prospected, from dawn to sunset. Each boat was paddled by seven or eight natives--muscular heathens, whose sole dress was a pocket-handkerchief, a little palm oil, and a few mosquitoes. Except at first the river was only a few yards broad, and changed in character and novelty every hour. Now it ran through a grove of cocoa-nut palms--the most wonderful and beautiful tree of the tropics. Now its sullen current oozed through a fœtid swamp of mangroves--the home of the crocodile and the hippopotamus, whose slimy bodies wallowed into the pools with a splash as our boats sped past. Again the banks became green and graceful, the long plumed grasses bending to the stream, and the whole a living aviary of birds--the white ibis and the gaunt fish eagle, and the exquisite blue and scarlet kingfisher watching its prey from the overhanging boughs. The businesslike air of this last bird is almost comical, and somehow sits ill on a creature of such gorgeous beauty. One expects him to flutter away before the approach of so material a thing as a boat, display his fairy plumage in a few airy movements, and melt away in the sunshine. But there he sits, stolid and impassive, and though the spray of the paddles almost dashes in his face, the intent eyes never move, and he refuses to acknowledge the intruder by so much as a glance. His larger ally, the black and