I would say to missionaries, Come on, brethren, to the real heathen.  You have no idea how brave you are till you try.  Leaving the coast tribes, and devoting yourselves heartily to the savages, as they are called, you will find, with some drawbacks and wickednesses, a very great deal to admire and love.  Many statements made about them require confirmation.  You will never see women selling their infants:  the Arabs never did, nor have I. An assertion of the kind was made by mistake.

Captive children are often sold, but not by their mothers.  Famine sometimes reduces fathers to part with them, but the selling of children, as a general practice, is quite unknown, and, as Speke put it, quite a mistake.

25th and 26th May, 1872.—­Cold weather.  Lewale sends for all Arabs to make a grand assault, as it is now believed that Mirambo is dead, and only his son, with few people, remains.

Two Whydah birds, after their nest was destroyed several times, now try again in another pomegranate-tree in the yard.  They put back their eggs, as they have the power to do, and build again.

The trout has the power of keeping back the ova when circumstances are unfavourable to their deposit.  She can quite absorb the whole, but occasionally the absorbents have too much to do; the ovarium, and eventually the whole abdomen, seems in a state of inflammation, as when they are trying to remove a mortified human limb; and the poor fish, feeling its strength leaving it, true to instinct, goes to the entrance to the burn where it ought to have spawned, and, unable to ascend, dies.  The defect is probably the want of the aid of a milter.

27th May, 1872.—­Another pair of the kind (in which the cock is redbreasted) had ten chickens, also rebuilds afresh.  The red cock-bird feeds all the brood.  Each little one puts his head on one side as he inserts his bill, chirruping briskly, and bothering him.  The young ones lift up a feather as a child would a doll, and invite others to do the same, in play.  So, too, with another pair.  The cock skips from side to side with a feather in his bill, and the hen is pleased:  nature is full of enjoyment.  Near Kasanganga’s I saw boys shooting locusts that settled on the ground with little bows and arrows.

Cock Whydah bird died in the night.  The brood came and chirruped to it for food, and tried to make it feed them, as if not knowing death!

A wagtail dam refused its young a caterpillar till it had been killed—­she ran away from it, but then gave it when ready to be swallowed.  The first smile of an infant with its toothless gums is one of the pleasantest sights in nature.  It is innocence claiming kinship, and asking to be loved in its helplessness.