UGANDA AND WEST SIDE OF VICTORIA NYANZA. 231 
sure round the palace courts and quarters, each avenue 
was fenced with tall matete (water-cane) neatly set very 
close together in uniform rows. The by-streets leading 
from one avenue to another were narrow and crooked. 
While I stood admiring the view, a page came up, 
and, kneeling, announced that he had been despatched 
by the Emperor to show me my house. Following him, 
I was ushered within a corner lot of the fenced square, 
between two avenues, into what I might appropriately 
term a ££ garden villa ” of Uganda. My house, standing 
in the centre of a plantain garden about 100 feet square, 
was twenty feet long, and of a marquee shape, with a 
miniature portico or eave projecting like a bonnet over the 
doorway, and was divided into two apartments. Close 
SEROMBO HUTS. 
by, about thirty feet off, were three dome-like huts for 
the boat’s crew and the kitchen, and in a corner of the 
garden was a railed space for our bullocks and goats. 
Were it not that I was ever anxious about my distant 
camp in Usukuma, I possessed almost everything requi- 
site to render a month’s stay very agreeable, and for 
the time I was as proud of my tiny villa as a London 
merchant is of his country house. 
In the afternoon I was invited to the palace. A 
number of people in brown robes, or white dresses, some 
with white goatskins over their brown robes, others 
with cords folded like a turban round their heads, which 
I heard were extinguishing marks of the executioners. 
