what stubborn Conservatives the Wanyamwezi are.  A duty lay yet before me which I owed to my illustrious companion, and that was to hurry to the coast as if on a matter of life and death—­act for him in the matter of enlisting men as if he were there himself—­to work for him with the same zeal as I would for myself—­not to halt or rest until his desires should be gratified, And this I vowed to do; but it was a death-blow to my project of going down the Nile, and getting news of Sir S. Baker.

The Doctor’s task of writing his letters was ended.  He delivered into my hand twenty letters for Great Britain, six for Bombay, two for New York, and one for Zanzibar.  The two letters for New York were for James Gordon Bennett, junior, as he alone, not his father, was responsible for the Expedition sent under my command.  I beg the reader’s pardon for republishing one of these letters here, as its spirit and style indicate the man, the mere knowledge of whose life or death was worth a costly Expedition.

Ujiji, on Tanganika, East Africa, November, 1871.

James Gordon Bennett, Jr., Esq.

My Dear Sir,—­It is in general somewhat difficult to write to one we have never seen—­it feels so much like addressing an abstract idea—­but the presence of your representative, Mr. H. M. Stanley, in this distant region takes away the strangeness I should otherwise have felt, and in writing to thank you for the extreme kindness that prompted you to send him, I feel quite at home.

If I explain the forlorn condition in which he found me you will easily perceive that I have good reason to use very strong expressions of gratitude.  I came to Ujiji off a tramp of between four hundred and five hundred miles, beneath a blazing vertical sun, having been baffled, worried, defeated and forced to return, when almost in sight of the end of the geographical part of my mission, by a number of half-caste Moslem slaves sent to me from Zanzibar, instead of men.  The sore heart made still sorer by the woeful sights I had seen of man’s inhumanity to man racked and told on the bodily frame, and depressed it beyond measure.  I thought that I was dying on my feet.  It is not too much to say that almost every step of the weary sultry way was in pain, and I reached Ujiji a mere ruckle of bones.

There I found that some five hundred pounds’ sterling worth of goods which I had ordered from Zanzibar had unaccountably been entrusted to a drunken half-caste Moslem tailor, who, after squandering them for sixteen months on the way to Ujiji; finished up by selling off all that remained for slaves and ivory for himself.  He had “divined” on the Koran and found that I was dead.  He had also written to the Governor of Unyanyembe that he had sent slaves after me to Manyuema, who returned and reported my decease, and begged permission to sell off the few goods that his drunken appetite had spared.

He, however, knew perfectly well, from men who had seen me, that I was alive, and waiting for the goods and men; but as for morality, he is evidently an idiot, and there being no law here except that of the dagger or musket, I had to sit down in great weakness, destitute of everything save a few barter cloths and beads, which I had taken the precaution to leave here in case of extreme need.