With an outburst of enthusiasm I replied that since I might be appointed to that station, and since the road was “simply grand,” I would buy a pair of donkeys at the Canary Islands and take them with me. “Man alive!” he exclaimed, “one would think you had never been in Africa; a donkey couldn’t get over it.” To my friends it was a hopeless paradox that a road could be “simply grand,” and yet be impassable to a donkey. Nevertheless, about that time they began using donkeys on the road to Efulen, so much had the roads been improved in the intervening years, and they have been using them more and more since that time. There is difficulty, however, in getting them over the streams and ravines, and I am not sure whether they are used to advantage in the wet season. Only experience will teach a man to walk the bush-road with the least effort; and some never learn. I can remember yet how on that first morning I shrunk from the water and the mud, trying to keep my feet dry and my clothes clean. I think Mr. Kerr had more sense from the beginning. I, however, was in a state of rigidity, both physical and mental, that would soon have exhausted me. But after a while a kindly Providence took me in hand, sending upon me a rapid succession of blessings in disguise. The mud lay deep in the path and I was trying to straddle it as I walked, when, as I sprang forward to clear a wider space, some demon was evidently permitted to catch my foot and throw it up, with the result that I landed full length on my back in the mud. A few minutes later the same impalpable enemy tripped me and I fell headlong on my stomach. Still later we reached a broad, black, quiescent pond of water of the consistency of molasses. “Can you swim?” said Dr. Good to me; “I forgot to ask you that.” “Yes,” said I, thinking of the glowing description he had given me of the road, “there were several things you forgot to ask me, and some things you forgot to tell. But even if I could not swim in clear water, I could probably swim in that pond.” We plunged in and were able to wade through it.