TO THE UASIN GISHU 
325 
in the South African War, and was now one of the heads 
of the Boma Trading Company. Among our fellow guests 
at this dinner was Captain Douglas Pennant of the British 
Army. When we went north to Kenia he went south to 
the Sotik. There he made a fine bag of lions; but having 
wounded a leopard and followed it into cover it suddenly 
sprang on him, apparently from a tree. His life was saved 
by his Somali gun-bearer who blew out the leopard’s brains 
as it bore him to the ground, so that it had time to make 
only one bite; but this bite just missed crushing in the skull, 
broke the jaw, tore off one ear, and caused ghastly wreck. 
He spent some weeks in the hospital at Nairobi, and then 
went for further treatment to England; his place in the 
hospital being taken by another man who had been injured 
by a leopard. 
There had been quite a plague of wild beasts in Nairobi 
itself. One family had been waked at midnight by a 
leopard springing on the roof of the house and thence to an 
adjacent shed; it finally spent a couple of hours on the 
veranda. A lion had repeatedly wandered at night through 
the outlying (the residential) portion of the town. Dr. 
Milne, the head of the Government Medical Department, 
had nearly run into it on his bicycle, and, as a measure of 
precaution, guests going out to dinner usually carried 
spears or rifles. One night I dined with the Provincial 
Commissioner, Mr. Hobley, and the next with the town 
clerk. Captain Sanderson. In each case the hostess, the 
host, and the house were all delightful, and the evening 
just like a very pleasant evening spent anywhere in civiliza¬ 
tion; the houses were only half a mile apart; and yet on the 
road between them a fortnight previously a lady on a 
