t stirred its poisonous vapors.

The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two
miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a
pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the
Larchmont Yacht Club. To the town itself Portugal has been content
to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of
customs and dispensers of official seals. She is indifferent to the
fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that
enter her port is brought there by foreigners. She only demands that
they buy her stamps. Her importance in her own colony is that of a
toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.

Lorenco Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.
When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the
twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of
Lorenco Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and
selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous
of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its
patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests
will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by
the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the
"tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had
found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat
difficult.

On her way from Lorenco Marquez to Beira our ship, the _Kanzlar_,
kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow
sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of
outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue
mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great
inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern
coast and against which the waves break with a report like the
bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and
the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills
accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw
Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many o