gorillas' brains; still I deeply regret he has not done more for science and geography. Had he but had Livingstone's conscientious devotion to taking notes and publishing them, we should know far more than we do at present about the hinterland from Cameroons to the Ogowé, and should have, for ethnological purposes, an immense mass of thoroughly reliable information about the manners and religions of the tribes therein, and Dr. Nassau's fame would be among the greatest of the few great African explorers—not that he would care a row of pins for that. I beg to state I am not grumbling at him, however, as I know he would say I was, because of his disparaging remarks on my pronunciation of M'pongwe names, but entirely from the justifiable irritation a student of fetish feels at knowing there is but one copy of this collection of materials, and that that copy is in the form of a human being and will disappear with him before it is half learnt by us, who cannot do the things he has done.
Get up very early, make a hasty breakfast, and walk to Nassau Bay, full of pleasant anticipations of a day's good fishing in those lakes. When I arrive at the village find I need not have hurried, so sit down for my usual wait.
At last Eveke, who has been making demonstrations of great activity in getting the ladies under way, succeeds in so doing—or, I fancy, more properly speaking, those ladies who are ready, and disposed to start on their own account, do so. Several men accompany the party and we leave the village by a path that goes round to the right of the plank-built house, plunges forthwith into a little ravine, goes across a dried swamp, up a hill and out on to an open prairie, all in about twenty minutes. The prairie has recently been burnt, and is a stretch of blackened green with the ruins of a few singed, or burnt up, trees rising from it.
These burnt lands are interesting, though they make one in a horrid mess. I now understand the rationale of the statement the natives have often made to me; namely, that if you fire the grass too soon, or when there is no wind, you kill it for good. If you wait until it is "dry too much" it is all right and you don't kill it. This is because the grass grows in a lot of bulb-like bottom tufts; when the outer and upper parts
