Monsieur Lafargue was a charming man, highly educated, with a mind of a peculiar character, that enabled him to lead a happy life in the remote wilderness of the Soudan. It was difficult to understand, when conversing with him in his beautiful house at Berber, or sitting together in his garden on the extreme margin of the Nile, while the desert sands upon the east side of the wall showed the limit of civilisation and fertility, how any man of culture could endure to pass his entire existence in such a narrow boundary--the Nile, the fruitful source, upon one side, and the desert 200 yards beyond; sterile, only because the water could not reach its surface. He had his books, all the monthly periodicals from Europe, and his newspapers; he also had his private affairs, his agency, which occupied his time; in addition, he had a wife, an Abyssinian lady of great beauty, and of gentle sympathetic disposition. To her husband she was as the moon is to the traveller upon an otherwise dark night. Her story was too romantic and sad to be lightly introduced, but her husband had given up his country, and his family in France, after having made his fortune in the Soudan, entirely upon her account. He described her to me as the "gazelle of the desert, that was contented and happy in its native sands, but would die in the atmosphere of conventional civilisation." Monsieur Lafargue held a deservedly high position among all classes in the Soudan. He had discovered that no legitimate commerce was possible with the savages of the White Nile; he had therefore advised his employer to that effect, and he had resigned all hope of effecting the original object of his expedition. He was therefore carrying on a business with the native merchants, from whom he purchased gum-arabic from Kordofan, ivory from the White Nile, hides from the Arabs generally, cotton, and cereals, all of which, as opportunity offered, he either sent down the river or across the Korosko desert to Egypt proper. We were talking about lions, and he told me the following account of what he witnessed as he was returning from the White Nile upon the steamer, then en route towards Khartoum. The dry season was at its height; all the high grass and other herbage along the river's banks had been burnt by the natives, and the surface of the earth was black and bare. The steamer was going easily down stream, saving her fuel, and as they floated along, with the paddles revolving slowly, a lion was observed upon the dark and lately blackened bank. The vessel was at once stopped, and a trustworthy Tokroori hunter of Lafargue's volunteered to shoot the lion. The man was confident; accordingly he was put ashore, armed only with a single-barrelled rifle.