The sepoys have become quite intolerable, and if I cannot get rid of them we shall all starve before we accomplish what we wish.  They dawdle behind picking up wild fruits, and over our last march (which we accomplished on the morning of the eighth day) they took from fourteen to twenty-two days.  Retaining their brutal feelings to the last they killed the donkey which I lent to the havildar to carry his things, by striking it on the head when in boggy places into which they had senselessly driven it loaded; then the havildar came on (his men pretending they could go no further from weakness), and killed the young buffalo and eat it when they thought they could hatch up a plausible story.  They said it had died, and tigers came and devoured it—­they saw them.  “Did you see the stripes of the tiger?” said I. All declared that they saw the stripes distinctly.  This gave us an idea of their truthfulness, as there is no striped tiger in all Africa.  All who resolved on skulking or other bad behaviour invariably took up with the sepoys; their talk seemed to suit evil-doers, and they were such a disreputable-looking lot that I was quite ashamed of them.  The havildar had no authority, and all bore the sulky dogged look of people going where they were forced but hated to go.  This hang-dog expression of countenance was so conspicuous that I many a time have heard the country people remark, “These are the slaves of the party.”  They have neither spirit nor pluck as compared with the Africans, and if one saw a village he turned out of the way to beg in the most abject manner, or lay down and slept, the only excuse afterwards being, “My legs were sore.”  Having allowed some of them to sleep at the fire in my house, they began a wholesale plunder of everything they could sell, as cartridges, cloths, and meat, so I had to eject them.  One of them then threatened to shoot my interpreter Simon if he got him in a quiet place away from the English power.  As this threat had been uttered three times, and I suspect that something of the kind had prevented the havildar exerting his authority, I resolved to get rid of them by sending them back to the coast by the first trader.  It is likely that some sympathizers will take their part, but I strove to make them useful.  They had but poor and scanty fare in a part of the way, but all of us suffered alike.  They made themselves thoroughly disliked by their foul talk and abuse, and if anything tended more than another to show me that theirs was a moral unfitness for travel, it was the briskness assumed when they knew they were going back to the coast.  I felt inclined to force them on, but it would have been acting from revenge, and to pay them out, so I forbore.  I gave Mataka forty-eight yards of calico, and to the sepoys eighteen yards, and arranged that he should give them food till Suleiman, a respectable trader, should arrive.  He was expected every day, and we passed him near the town.  If they chose to go and get their luggage, it was of course all safe for them behind.  The havildar begged still to go on with me, and I consented, though he is a drag on the party, but he will count in any difficulty.