comes will search for our bottle and see another appointment for 30th of July.  This goes with despatches by way of Quilimane, and I hope some day to get from you a letter by the same route.  We have got no news from home since we left Liverpool, and we long now to hear how all goes on in Europe and in India.  I am now on my way to Tette, but we ran up the Shire some forty miles to buy rice for our company.  Uncle Charles is there, He has had some fever, but is better.  We left him there about two months ago, and Dr. Kirk and I, with some fifteen Makololo, ascended this river one hundred miles in the ‘Ma-Robert,’ then left the vessel and proceeded beyond that on foot till we had discovered a magnificent lake called Shirwa (pronounced Shurwah).  It was very grand, for we could not see the end of it, though some way up a mountain; and all around it are mountains much higher than any you see in Scotland.  One mountain stands in the lake, and people live on it.  Another, called Zomba, is more than six thousand feet high, and people live on it too, for we could see their gardens on its top, which is larger than from Glasgow to Hamilton, or about from fifteen to eighteen miles.  The country is quite a Highland region, and many people live in it.  Most of them were afraid of us.  The women ran into their huts and shut the doors.  The children screamed in terror, and even the hens would fly away and leave their chickens.  I suppose you would be frightened, too, if you saw strange creatures, say a lot of Trundlemen, like those on the Isle of Man pennies, come whirling up the street.  No one was impudent to us except some slave-traders, but they became civil as soon as they learned we were English and not Portuguese.  We saw the sticks they employ for training any one whom they have just bought.  One is is about eight feet long, the head, or neck rather, is put into the space between the dotted lines and shaft, and another slave carries the end.  When they are considered tame they are allowed to go in chains.

     [Illustration]

“I am working in the hope that in the course of time this horrid system may cease.  All the country we traveled through is capable of growing cotton and sugar, and the people now cultivate a good deal.  They would grow much more if they could only sell it.  At present we in England are the mainstay of slavery in America and elsewhere by buying slave-grown produce.  Here there are hundreds of miles of land lying waste, and so rich that the grass towers far over one’s head in walking.  You cannot see where the narrow paths end, the grass is so tall and overhangs them so.  If our countrymen were here they would soon render slave-buying unprofitable.  Perhaps God may honor us to open up the way for this.  My heart is sore when I think of so many of our countrymen in poverty and misery, while they might be doing so much good to themselves and others where our Heavenly Father has so abundantly provided fruitful hills and fertile valleys.  If