9th December, 1866.—­A poor child, whose mother had died, was unprovided for; no one not a relative will nurse another’s child.  It called out piteously for its mother by name, and the women (like the servants in the case of the poet Cowper when a child), said, “She is coming.”  I gave it a piece of bread, but it was too far gone, and is dead to-day.

An alarm of Mazitu sent all the villagers up the sides of Mparawe this morning.  The affair was a chase of a hyaena, but everything is Mazitu!  The Babisa came here, but were surrounded and nearly all cut off.  Muasi was so eager to be off with a party to return the attack on the Mazitu, that, when deputed by the headman to give us a guide, he got the man to turn at the first village, so we had to go on without guides, and made about due north.

11th December, 1866.—­We are now detained in the forest, at a place called Chonde Forest, by set-in rains.  It rains every day, and generally in the afternoon; but the country is not wetted till the “set-in” rains commence; the cracks in the soil then fill up and everything rushes up with astonishing rapidity; the grass is quite crisp and soft.  After the fine-grained schist, we came on granite with large flakes of talc in it.  This forest is of good-sized trees, many of them mopane.  The birds now make much melody and noise—­all intent on building.

12th December, 1866.—­Across an undulating forest country north we got a man to show us the way, if a pathless forest can so be called.  We used a game-path as long as it ran north, but left it when it deviated, and rested under a baobab-tree with a marabou’s nest—­a bundle of sticks on a branch; the young ones uttered a hard chuck, chuck, when the old ones flew over them.  A sun-bird, with bright scarlet throat and breast, had its nest on another branch, it was formed like the weaver’s nest, but without a tube.  I observed the dam picking out insects from the bark and leaves of the baobab, keeping on the wing the while:  it would thus appear to be insectivorous as well as a honey-bibber.  Much spoor of elands, zebras, gnus, kamas, pallahs, buffaloes, reed-bucks, with tsetse, their parasites.

13th December, 1866.—­Reached the Tokosusi, which is said to rise at Nombe Rume, about twenty yards wide and knee deep, swollen by the rains:  it had left a cake of black tenacious mud on its banks.  Here I got a pallah antelope, and a very strange flower called “katende,” which was a whorl of seventy-two flowers sprung from a flat, round root; but it cannot be described.  Our guide would have crossed the Tokosusi, which was running north-west to join the Loangwa, and then gone to that river; but always when we have any difficulty the “lazies” exhibit themselves.  We had no grain; and three remained behind spending four hours at what we did in an hour and a quarter.  Our guide became tired and turned, not before securing another; but he would not go over the Loangwa; no one likes to go out of