Soldiering and Sport in Uganda 



a bill, and the third missive was intended for a 

 missionary who enjoyed a similar name to my own 

 in the Roman Catholic branch at Mbarara! A few 

 papers helped to make up for a deficiency in the 

 literary line, though they afforded but little satisfac- 

 tion to our commissariat department. 



Well, life went on just the same as ever. We 

 began to think we were forgotten. We worked 

 out chess problems, and I personally commenced 

 answering a very much previously neglected cor- 

 respondence, until paper gave out again. I then 

 started compiling a useful vocabulary of Swahili and 

 Nuby to add to the one on the Unyoro dialect, 

 which I had already started. I also tried to pick up 

 a little Ankole with a view of forming into one 

 compact volume a dictionary containing all the 

 ordinary words in use among the different tribes in 

 Uganda, as a help to others who might come after 

 me. For this purpose I made my orderly come 

 into my hut after dinner, and derived much amuse- 

 ment in puzzling the words out of him. For 

 instance, in learning the names of animals, I had to 

 imitate their bark or grunt, and then he would 

 tell me the native names. This was often very 

 ludicrous, and we both went into roars of laughter 

 over it. On one occasion I could not make him 

 understand that I wished to learn the Nuby for the 

 ordinary common or garden fly, and the way I got 

 at it was, " Meat which flies round the lamps." 

 After this he volunteered the information that ants 

 made very good eating, but flies always gave him a 



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