intelligent men to act as guides.

"You shall have your will, you shall have your will," answered the king,
"but stay one day longer, just one day."

We accordingly, hoping to have no obstruction offered to our departure,
agreed to stay, but when the evening arrived the king sent a messenger
to say he wished to see us.

"What, my friends," he began as we entered his hut--"do you want to go
and leave me all forlorn, stay another day, stay another day."

Such was the tenor of his address which Aboh translated to us.

"Tell him that to-morrow we must go," said Charley.

The king smiled benignantly, so Harry declared, although he appeared to
me to make a very hideous grimace.

The next day, early in the morning, we all four loaded our muskets, and
asked Aboh if he was ready to accompany us.

"King, he give him leave, him go at once," he answered.

No sooner did we quit our hut than we saw all the men of the village,
fully armed, collected at the outlets, evidently resolved to stop us by
force. Although we might have fought our way through them, we could not
have done so without bloodshed. Again we resolved to make a virtue of
necessity, and remain until we could find a favourable opportunity of
escaping.

Several days passed by, and every morning, when we were prepared to set
out, we found the village guarded as before. When, however, we left our
packs behind us, we were allowed to ramble at perfect freedom. Besides
Aboh and Shimbo we found a party always ready to accompany us and act as
beaters.

Not wishing it to be supposed that we intended to leave that morning, we
quietly returned to our hut, and undoing our knapsacks again went out,
simply with our rifles in our hands, as if we intended to have a little
shooting before breakfast. We had not gone far when we saw a woman near
the shore of the lake apparently hunting about and calling out to some
one in tones of distress.

"Who is she? and what is it all about?" I asked Aboh.

"She king's wife. Go bathe, lose piccaninny."

We hurried on until we met the poor woman. She then explained that
while she was bathing in a sheltered pool she had left her little boy on
the bank of the lake to play about and amuse himself, but when she came
out of the water she could nowhere find him. Of course it at once
occurred to us that a crocodile must have carried him off, but Aboh
averred that if such was the case the mother would have heard him cry
out. He might