Breakfast and luncheon and dinner are all the same in Africa. There is no beef, nor mutton, nor bread, nor flour, nor sugar, nor salt, nor anything whatever, except an occasional fowl, which an Englishman can eat. Hence the enormous outfit which he must carry with him. No one has any idea of what can be had in tins till he camps out abroad. Every conceivable digestible and indigestible is to be had tinned, every form of fish, flesh, fowl, and game, every species of vegetable, and fruit, every soup, sweet, and _entrée_; but after two or three months of this sort of thing you learn that this tempting semblance of variety is a gigantic imposition. The sole difference between these various articles lies, like the Rhine wines, in the label. Plum pudding or kippered herring taste just the same. Whether you begin dinner with tinned calves-foot jelly or end with tinned salmon makes no difference; and after six months it is only by a slight feeling of hardness that you do not swallow the tins themselves. At the end of a too short week we left our boats behind. Engaging an army of shy natives at a few huts near the bank, we struck across a low neck of land, and after an hour's walk found ourselves suddenly on the banks of the Zambesi. A solitary bungalow was in sight, and opposite it the little steamer of the African Lakes Company, which was to take us up the Shiré. There is more in the association, perhaps, than in the landscape, to strike one as he first furrows the waters of this virgin river. We are fifty miles from its mouth, the mile-wide water shallow and brown, the low sandy banks fringed with alligators and wild birds. The great deltoid plain, yellow with sun-tanned reeds and sparsely covered with trees, stretches on every side; the sun is blistering hot; the sky, as it will be for months, a monotonous dome of blue--not a frank bright blue like the Canadian sky, but a veiled blue, a suspicious and malarious blue, partly due to the perpetual heat haze and partly to the imagination, for the Zambesi is no friend to the European, and this whole region is heavy with depressing memories.