MSUATA. 185 
fold—No, it is worse, three of our four milk-providers 
have been strangled, and the fourth is going about 
bleeding at the neck and baaing piteously. This is 
- indeed a disaster, but after all it has occurred. several 
times before, so we sit down to our breakfast and discuss 
with resignation the best mode of setting a trap for the 
depredator. When the meal is finished, Janssen goes to 
review the men and settle the routine of work for the day, 
and I, with Faraji, Mafta, and Imbono, start for a morn-_ 
ing’s ramble in the river-side forest. Perhaps for that 
end I cross the Congo, for on the northern bank the 
country is almost an uninhabited wilderness, wholly 
given up to nature in parts. We go, then, to the clayey 
shore; below the station, and loose from its moorings a 
native canoe, a “ dug-out,” perhaps fifteen feet in length 
and three feet in its greatest width. But before embark- 
ing the sky is carefully scanned to ascertain the probable 
state of the weather for the next few hours, for should a 
storm be threatening it would be madness to adventure 
ourselves on the river. If the verdict be “set fair,’ we 
enter the canoe, the men take the paddles, and the wobbly 
craft, with a disagreeable rocking motion from side to 
side, that brings either edge in turn on a level with 
the water, proceeds to make way laboriously up-stream. 
We coast along past the landing-place of the village of 
Msuata, or Gobila as it is sometimes called, after its chief, 
where all the natives’ canoes are drawn up on the beach 
or fastened to piles rising out of the water, and where 
many little children are playing the innocent, imaginative 
games common to all childkind, while a few of their 
elders are fishing or making ready to set out on a journey ; 
past the banana groves skirting the eroups of yellow- 
thatched houses, then along the great river-fronting wall 
of forest, where the sprawling, untidy calamus palms 
clamber up over the noble eriodendron trees, untidy and 
irregular in their means of ascent, but endowed with an 
indefatigable ambition to be at the top of everything. 
Then we reach a certain dead tree lying prone on the 
shore, with its leafless branches stretching upwards almost 
