At a brook of the sweetest water, purling over the cleanest and brightest of golden sands, we filled the canteens, this being the last opportunity for some time.  Forest walks are thirsty work during the hot season; the air is close, fetid, and damp with mire; the sea-breeze has no power to enter, and perspiration streams from every pore.  After heavy rains it is still worse, the surface of the land is changed, and paths become lines of dark puddles; the nullahs, before dry, roll muddy, dark-brown streams, and their mouths streak the sea with froth and scum.  Hardly a living object meets the eye, and only the loud, whirring flight of some large bird breaks the dreary silence.  The music of the surf now sounded like the song of the sea-shell as we crossed another rough prism of stone and bush, whose counter-slope fell gently into a sand-flat overgrown with Ipomaa and other bright flowering plants.  After walking about an hour (equal to 2.50 miles) between south and south-west, we saluted the pleasant aspect of Greek with a general cheer.  Northwards lay Point Ipizarala, southways Nyonye, both looking like tree-clumps rising from the waves.  I could not sufficiently admire, and I shall never forget the exquisite loveliness of land and sea; the graceful curve of the beach, a hundred feet broad, fining imperceptibly away till lost in the convexity of waters.  The morning sun, half way to the zenith, burned bright in a cloudless sky, whilst in the east and west distant banks of purple mist coloured the liquid plain with a cool green-blue, a celadon tint that reposed the eye and the brain.  The porpoise raised in sport his dark, glistening back to the light of day, and plunged into the cool depths as if playing off the “amate sponde” of the Mediterranean; and sandpipers and curlews, the latter wild as ever, paced the smooth, pure floor.  The shoreline was backed by a dark vegetable wall, here and there broken and fronted by single trees, white mangroves tightly corded down, and raised on stilted roots high above the tide.  Between wood and wave lay powdered sandstone of lively yellow, mixed with bright white quartz and debris of pink shells.  Upon the classic shores of Greece I should have thought of Poseidon and the Nereids; but the lovely scene was in unromantic Africa, which breeds no such visions of

     “The fair humanities of old religion.”

Resuming our road, we passed the ruins of an “Olako,” the khambi of East Africa, a temporary encampment, whose few poles were still standing under a shady tree.  We then came upon a blockaded lagoon; the sea-water had been imprisoned by a high bank which the waves had washed up, and it will presently be released by storms from the south-west.  Near the water, even at half-ebb, we find the floor firm and pleasant; it becomes loose walking at high tide, and the ribbed banks are fatiguing to ascend and descend under a hot sun and in reeking air.  A seine would have supplied a man-of-war in a few hours; large turtle