210 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATtJRAL BISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XII. 



able to do any work for months. The apothecary was close at hand, so I 

 had the boy examined there and then and he was pronounced to be saturated 

 with malaria from exposure ; his spleen too was very much enlarged, I 

 determined therefore to hand him over to my Goanese cook and see what 

 could be done for him. If he recovered I thought he would make a useful 

 little dogboy and that my wife, whom I expected in the cold weather, 

 might be able to make something of him. For some weeks he was too weak 

 and ill to give much evidence as to how he was likely to shape, but care and 

 regular feeding gradually put him right and it soon became apparent that his 

 wits had been much sharpened by privation and that he was a very smart boy. 

 In the first two months he picked up Hindustani from my cook and could 

 talk quite fluently, and he could also speak Amharic, (i.e., Abyssinian) 

 Galla, Somali, and Arabic. By the time my wife arrived he was a bright, spry 

 little fellow, but even at his tender age he was imbued with every vice the 

 tiesh is heir to, and this soon became evident as his health returned. He 

 drank, smoked, took opium when he could get it, and was up to every sort 

 of devilment. I was a keen conchologist at the time and used to take him 

 out with me shell hunting — he soon got to know what was rare and what I 

 wanted — and at once made use of his knowledge at my expense. I found one 

 day that ho had extracted several rare specimens from a jar of shells that I 

 had left to clean on the roof buried in sand and had handed them over to two 

 local Somali urchins whom he subsequently introduced to me as having found 

 some shells that I badly wanted. I was delighted to get the specimens 

 and gave the boys liberal bucksheesh, but when making a more minute 

 examination of ;them I recognised one of them as being my own property 

 owing to its having a slight malformation. Then the cat was out of the 

 bag ; I went up to look at my jar on the roof and discovered the urchin's 

 perfidy, but by this time master Yusuf had decamped to the bazar with 

 his proteges to spend the result of his successful enterprise. For this 

 atrocity he received condign punishment, " in the .manner of school 

 discipline," the only form of correction which had anything but a momentary 

 effect on him. 



For a long time it was never safe to give him any money, as the old Egyp- 

 tian bungalow then occupied by the Political Officer was in the middle of the 

 native town, and on the first opportunity he would slip out and waste it in 

 treating himself and any juvenile Somalis that he could find to a drink or 

 some tobacco. I eventually broke him, for the time at all events, of his taste 

 for spirituous liquors, but never succeeded in curing him of smoking. If I 

 stopped his supply he would collect all my cheroot ends for secret consump- 

 tion, and finally as I found that he got quite ill and good for nothing if he 

 did not smoke, I had to give him a regular ration of tobacco. 



July wife took an immense deal of trouble with him and endeavoured to 

 instil a little elementary morality und self-respect into him. In the course 



