informants reached this region, and kings, emperors, and all the great men of antiquity longed in vain to know the fountains, exploration does not seem to have become the other sex either.  She came much further up than the two centurions sent by Nero Caesar.

“I have to go down and see where the two arms unite,—­the lost city Meroe ought to be there,—­then get back to Ujiji to get a supply of goods which I have ordered from Zanzibar, turn bankrupt after I secure them, and let my creditors catch me if they can, as I finish up by going round outside and south of all the sources, so that I may be sure no one will cut me out and say he found other sources south of mine.  This is one reason for my concluding trip; another is to visit the underground houses in stone, and the copper mines of Katanga which have been worked for ages (Malachite).  I have still a seriously long task before me.  My letters have been delayed inexplicably, so I don’t know my affairs.  If I have a salary I don’t know it, though the Daily Telegraph abused me for receiving it when I had none.  Of this alone I am sure—­my friends will all wish me to make a complete work of it before I leave, and in their wish I join.  And it is better to go in now than to do it in vain afterward.”

“I have still a seriously long task before me.”  Yet he had lately been worse in health and weaker than he had ever been; he was much poorer than he expected to be, and the difficulties had proved far beyond any he had hitherto experienced.  But so far from thinking of taking things more easily than before, he actually enlarges his programme, and resolves to “finish up by going round outside and south of all the sources.”  His spirit seems only to rise as difficulties are multiplied.

He writes to his daughter Agnes at the same time:  “You remark that you think you could have traveled as well as Mrs. Baker, and I think so too.  Your mamma was famous for roughing it in the bush, and was never a trouble.”  The allusion carries him to old days—­their travels to Lake ’Ngami, Mrs. Livingstone’s death, the Helmores, the Bishop, Thornton.  Then he speaks of recent troubles and difficulties, his attack of pneumonia, from which he had not expected to recover, his annoyances with his men, so unlike the old Makololo, the loss of his letters and boxes, with the exception of two from an unknown donor that contained the Saturday Review and his old friend Punch for 1868.  Then he goes over African travelers and their achievements, real and supposed.  He returns again to the achievements of ladies, and praises Miss Tinne and other women.  “The death-knell of American slavery was rung by a woman’s hand.  We great he-beasts say Mrs. Stowe exaggerated.  From what I have seen of slavery I say exaggeration is a simple impossibility.  I go with the sailor who, on seeing slave-traders, said:  ’If the devil don’t catch these fellows, we might as well have no devil at all.’”