had been for that of Dr. Kirk and Rae, and he returned in a sadly haggard and exhausted condition; diarrhoea supervened, and that ended in dysentery and fever, which terminated fatally on the 21st of April, 1863.  He received the unremitting attentions of Dr. Kirk, and Dr. Meller, surgeon of the “Pioneer,” during the fortnight of his illness; and as he had suffered very little from fever, or any other disease, in Africa, we had entertained strong hopes that his youth and unimpaired constitution would have carried him through.  During the night of the 20th his mind wandered so much, that we could not ascertain his last wishes; and on the morning of the 21st, to our great sorrow, he died.  He was buried on the 22nd, near a large tree on the right bank of the Shire, about five hundred yards from the lowest of the Murchison Cataracts—­and close to a rivulet, at which the “Lady Nyassa” and “Pioneer” lay.

No words can convey an adequate idea of the scene of widespread desolation which the once pleasant Shire Valley now presented.  Instead of smiling villages and crowds of people coming with things for sale, scarcely a soul was to be seen; and, when by chance one lighted on a native, his frame bore the impress of hunger, and his countenance the look of a cringing broken-spiritedness.  A drought had visited the land after the slave-hunting panic swept over it.  Had it been possible to conceive the thorough depopulation which had ensued, we should have avoided coming up the river.  Large masses of the people had fled down to the Shire, only anxious to get the river between them and their enemies.  Most of the food had been left behind; and famine and starvation had cut off so many, that the remainder were too few to bury the dead.  The corpses we saw floating down the river were only a remnant of those that had perished, whom their friends, from weakness, could not bury, nor over-gorged crocodiles devour.  It is true that famine caused a great portion of this waste of human life:  but the slave-trade must be deemed the chief agent in the ruin, because, as we were informed, in former droughts all the people flocked from the hills down to the marshes, which are capable of yielding crops of maize in less than three months, at any time of the year, and now they were afraid to do so.  A few, encouraged by the Mission in the attempt to cultivate, had their little patches robbed as successive swarms of fugitives came from the hills.  Who can blame these outcasts from house and home for stealing to save their wretched lives, or wonder that the owners protected the little all, on which their own lives depended, with club and spear?  We were informed by Mr. Waller of the dreadful blight which had befallen the once smiling Shire Valley.  His words, though strong, failed to impress us with the reality.  In fact, they were received, as some may accept our own, as tinged with exaggeration; but when our eyes beheld the last mere driblets of this cup of woe, we for the first time felt that the enormous wrongs inflicted on our fellow-men by slaving are beyond exaggeration.