th
those in which roamed the cave men of the Pleistocene. But to Billy was
reserved the most ridiculous contrast of all. Her bedroom opened to a
veranda a few feet above a formal garden. This was a very formal garden,
with a sundial, gravelled walks, bordered flower beds, and clipped
border hedges. One night she heard a noise outside. Slipping on a warm
wrap and seizing her trusty revolver she stole out on the veranda to
investigate. She looked over the veranda rail. There just below her,
trampling the flower beds, tracking the gravel walks, endangering the
sundial, stood a hippopotamus!

We had neighbours six or seven miles away. At times they came down to
spend the night and luxuriate in the comforts of civilization. They were
a Lady A., and her nephew, and a young Scotch acquaintance the nephew
had taken into partnership. They had built themselves circular houses
of papyrus reeds with conical thatched roofs and earth floors, had
purchased ox teams and gathered a dozen or so Kikuyus, and were engaged
in breaking a farm in the wilderness. The life was rough and hard, and
Lady A. and her nephew gently bred, but they seemed to be having quite
cheerfully the time of their lives. The game furnished them meat, as it
did all of us, and they hoped in time that their labours would make the
land valuable and productive. Fascinating as was the life, it was also
one of many deprivations. At Juja were a number of old copies of Life,
the pretty girls in which so fascinated the young men that we broke the
laws of propriety by presenting them, though they did not belong to us.
C., the nephew, was of the finest type of young Englishman, clean
cut, enthusiastic, good looking, with an air of engaging vitality
and optimism. His partner, of his own age, was an insufferable youth.
Brought up in some small Scottish valley, his outlook had never
widened. Because he wanted to buy four oxen at a cheaper price, he tried
desperately to abrogate quarantine regulations. If he had succeeded, he
would have made a few rupees, but would have introduced disease in his
neighbours' herds. This consideration did not affect him. He was much
given to sneering at what he could not understand; and therefore, a
great deal met with his disapproval. His reading had evidently brought
him down only to about the middle sixties; and affairs at that date were
to him still burning questions. Thus he would declaim vehemently over
the Alabama claims.

"I blush with sh