Drainage and cleanliness are panaceas for the evils of malaria where tropical suns shine. Drainage of swamps and lagoons can improve S’a Leone, and can take away the stink from South African barracks. Zanzibar city, I contend, owes much of its fatality to want of drainage, and it might readily be drained into comparative healthiness. But the East African Arab holds the possibility of pestilence and the probability of fever to be less real evils than those of cutting a ditch, of digging a drain, or of opening a line for ventilation. The Dollar-hunters from Europe are a mere floating population, ever looking to the deluge in prospect, and of course unwilling to do every man’s business, that is—to drain. Such was Zanzibar city when I first walked through it. Though dating beyond the days of Arab history, and made, by its insular and central situation, the depôt of the richest trade in Eastern Africa, its present buildings are almost all modern. At the beginning of this our nineteenth century it consisted of a fort and a ragged line of huts, where the ‘Suk Muhogo’ now stands. Dr Ruschenberger (1835) satisfied himself that ‘the town of Zanzibar and its inhabitants possess as few attractions for a Christian stranger as any place and people in the wide world.’ As late as 1842 this chief emporium of a most wealthy coast boasted but five store-houses of the humblest description, and the east end was a palm plantation. Since my departure the city, as the trade returns show, has, despite unfavourable political circumstances, progressed. A Catholic mission, sent by France, has established an hospital, and two schools for boys and girls, and the English Central African Mission has followed suit. These establishments must differ strangely from the normal thing— the white-bearded pedagogue, hugging his bones or rocking himself before a large chintz-covered copy of the Koran, placed upon a stand two feet high, so as to be above man’s girdle, and, when done with, swathed in cloth and stowed away. A change, too, there must be in the pupils; formerly half a dozen ragged boys, some reciting with nasal monotonous voices sentences to be afterwards understood by instinct, others scraping the primitive writing-board with a pointed stick.