CAIRO TO KISUMU the chief officers stay, are one-story tin buildings. The telegraphic offices are connected with them.

Both railroad and telegraph are run by the govern¬ ment. The telegraphic rates are comparatively low.

Far off here in the jungles of Africa one can send messages much more cheaply than in the United States. A mes¬ sage of eight words from here to Uganda costs thirty-three cents, and one can telegraph to London about as cheaply as from New York to San Francisco. This is so notwith¬ standing the difficulty which the linemen have to keep up the wires, which the jewellery-loving natives steal. Dur¬ ing the Nandi rebellion, forty-odd miles of it were carried away and never recovered, and in one of the provinces adjoining Uganda, above Lake Victoria, the natives are so crazy after the copper wire there used that it is almost impossible to keep the lines in shape.

Another serious danger to the telegraph is the big game. The giraffes reach up and play with the brackets and pull the wire this way and that. At Naivasha the hippopotami have once or twice butted down the poles, and I hear they have been doing considerable damage to the lines along the coast near the Tana River. In the heart of Uganda the monkeys have a way of swinging on the wires and twisting them together, which stops the transmission of messages, so that the way of the lineman is indeed hard.

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