THE OPEN-AIR BEDROOM 91 in late in the evening with a spear and only one eye. What comfort there is in accustomedness ! The white man is foolish and always on his guard, so to speak ; his eyes rove from bush to bush with expectation, and he feels the moral support of a -400 rifle. These are black men who dare the paths of leopard and lion with merely a piece of sharpened iron on the end of a stick yet command their respect. The recent footprint of a lion at large on his native soil affords a sensation to a frequenter of Regent's Park which is mere amusement to the man who is born amongst four-footed enemies ; yet their hate is stronger than ours for the great cat, and their delight at his fall more full of enthusiasm.

The diary is written in the midst of great darkness ; " Mrs. Sun "—as I have to call the moon in my ignorance of the Arabic term—just having been born, knowledge of the world around is bounded by the narrowest limits. The night air is dry and warm, tempered by a cool breeze.

Talk about Robin Hood and the greenwood tree, he must have had rheumatism ! The grey tree skeletons vacillate in the flicker of the fires. No landlady's coal-scuttle feeds our flames ; whole trees burn to give warning to lion that they had best seek other meat than man, camel or donkey (to say nothing of my mule and the hippo meat). No " shilling a night " oil-lamp shows up the sphinxlike shape of the camel, grotesque and motionless, and the kindly black forms crouching round, full of