According to the Arabs and Hindus of Zanzibar, ague and fever are to be avoided only by perspiring during sleep under a blanket in a closed room—a purgatory for a healthy hot-blooded man in this damp tepid region. I found the cure-almost-as-bad-as-the-disease precaution adopted by the Spanish colonists at my salubrious residence—Fernando Po, West Africa. Only two officers escaped ‘chills,’ and they both courageously carried out the preventive system: on the other hand, it was remarked that they looked more aged, and they appeared to have suffered more from the climate, than those who shook once a month with ‘rigors.’ There is certainly no better prescription for catching ague than a coolth of skin during sleep: having purchased experience at a heavy price, it is my invariable practice when awaking with a chilly epiderm to drink a glass of water ‘cold without,’ and to bury myself for an hour under a pile of blankets. Every slave-hut has a cartel or cot, and the savages of the coast, like those of the Upper Nile, carry about wooden stools for fear of dysentery. I have mentioned how our sailors dig their graves. So much for the male sex. European women here, as in the Gulf of Guinea, rarely resist the melancholy isolation, the want of society, and the Nostalgia—Heimweh or Home-sickness—so common, yet so little regarded in tropical countries. Under normal circumstances Equatorial Africa is certain death to the Engländerin. I am surprised at the combined folly and brutality of civilized husbands who, anxious to be widowers, poison, cut the throats, or smash the skulls of their better-halves. The thing can be as neatly and quietly, safely and respectably, effected by a few months of African air at Zanzibar or Fernando Po, as by the climate of the Maremma to which the enlightened Italian noble condemned his spouse.