engraven on his heart—­fever and tsetse; the one the great scourge of man, the other of beast, in South Africa.  To help to counteract two such foes to African civilization no trouble or expense would have been judged too great.  Already he had lost nine of his buffaloes at Zanzibar.  It was a sad pity that owing to the ill-treatment of the remaining animals by his people, who turned out a poor lot, it could never be known conclusively whether the tsetse-bite was fatal to them or not.

In spite of all he had suffered in Africa, and though he was without the company of a single European, he had, in setting out, something of the exhilarating feeling of a young traveler starting on his first tour in Switzerland, deepened by the sense of nobility which there is in every endeavor to do good to others.  “The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great....  The sweat of one’s brow is no longer a curse when one works for God; it proves a tonic to the system, and is actually a blessing.”  The Rovuma was found to have changed greatly since his last visit, so that he had to land his goods twenty-five miles to the north at Mikindany harbor, and find his way down to the river farther up.  The toil was fitted to wear out the strongest of his men.  Nothing could have been more grateful than the Sunday rest.  Through his Nassick boys, he tried to teach the Makonde—­a tribe that bore a very bad character, but failed; however, the people were wonderfully civil, and, contrary to all previous usage, neither inflicted fines nor made complaints, though the animals had done some damage to their corn.  He set this down as an answer to his prayers for influence among the heathen.

His vexations, however, were not long of beginning.  Both the Sepoy marines and the Nassick boys were extremely troublesome, and treated the animals abominably.  The Johanna men were thieves.  The Sepoys became so intolerable that after four months’ trial he sent most of them back to the coast.  It required an effort to resist the effect of such, things, owing to the tendency of the mind to brood over the ills of travel.  The natives were not unkindly, but food was very scarce.  As they advanced, the horrors of the slave-trade presented themselves in all their hideous aspects.  Women were found dead, tied to trees, or lying in the path shot and stabbed, their fault having been inability to keep up with the party, while their amiable owners, to prevent them from becoming the property of any one else, put an end to their lives.  In some instances the captives, yet in the slave-sticks, were found not quite dead.  Brutality was sometimes seen in another form, as when some natives laughed at a poor boy suffering from a very awkward form of hernia, whose mother was trying to bind up the part.  The slave-trade utterly demoralized the people; the Arabs bought whoever was brought to them, and the great extent of forest in the country favored kidnapping; otherwise the people were honest.