e effect of such, things,
owing to the tendency of the mind to brood over the ills of travel. The
natives were not unkindly, but food was very scarce. As they advanced,
the horrors of the slave-trade presented themselves in all their hideous
aspects. Women were found dead, tied to trees, or lying in the path shot
and stabbed, their fault having been inability to keep up with the
party, while their amiable owners, to prevent them from becoming the
property of any one else, put an end to their lives. In some instances
the captives, yet in the slave-sticks, were found not quite dead.
Brutality was sometimes seen in another form, as when some natives
laughed at a poor boy suffering from a very awkward form of hernia,
whose mother was trying to bind up the part. The slave-trade utterly
demoralized the people; the Arabs bought whoever was brought to them,
and the great extent of forest in the country favored kidnapping;
otherwise the people were honest.

Farther on they passed through an immense uninhabited tract, that had
once evidently had a vast population. Then, in the Waiyau country, west
of Mataka's, came a splendid district 3400 feet above the sea, as well
adapted for a settlement as Magomero, but it had taken them four months
to get at it, while Magomero was reached in three weeks. The abandonment
of that mission he would never cease to regret. As they neared Lake
Nyassa, slave parties became more common. On the 8th August, 1866, they
reached the lake, which seemed to Livingstone like an old familiar
friend which he never expected to see again. He thanked God, bathed
again in the delicious water, and felt quite exhilarated.

Writing to his son Thomas, 28th August, he says:

"The Sepoys were morally unfit for travel, and then we had
hard lines, all of us. Food was not to be had for love or
money. Our finest cloths only brought miserable morsels of
the common grain. I trudged it the whole way, and having no
animal food save what turtle-doves and guinea-fowls we
occasionally shot, I became like one of Pharaoh's lean kine.
The last tramp [to Nyassa] brought us to a land of plenty. It
was over a very fine country, but quite depopulated.... The
principal chief, named Mataka, lives on the watershed
overhanging this, but fifty miles or more distant from this;
his town contained a thousand houses--many of them square, in
imitation of the Arabs. Large patches of Eng