THE LAND OF FOOTPRINTS 



sash with a tassel, a pair of spiral puttees, an old 

 pair of shoes, and a personal private small boy, 

 picked up en route from some of the savage tribes, 

 to carry his cooking pot, make his fires, draw his 

 water, and generally perform his lordly behests. 

 This was indeed "more-than-oriental-splendour!" 



From now on Fundi considered himself my sec- 

 ond gunbearer. I had no use for him, but Fundi's 

 development interested me, and I wanted to give 

 him a chance. His main fault at first was eagerness. 

 He had to be rapped pretty sharply and a good 

 number of times before he discovered that he really 

 must walk in the rear. His habit of calling my at- 

 tention to perfectly obvious things I cured by liberal 

 sarcasm. His intense desire to take his own line as 

 perhaps opposed to mine when we were casting about 

 on trail, I abated kindly but firmly with the toe of 

 my boot. His evident but mistaken tendency to 

 consider himself on an equality with Memba Sasa 

 we both squelched by giving him the hard and dirty 

 work to do. But his faults were never those of 

 voluntary omission, and he came on surprisingly; 

 in fact so surprisingly that he began to get quite 

 cocky over it. Not that he was ever in the least 

 aggressive or disrespectful or neglectful — it would 

 have been easy to deal with that sort of thing — 

 but he carried his h^^d pretty high, and evidently 



3oa 



