all the narrow town. Antelope horns were everywhere hung on the walls;
and teakwood easy-chairs, with rests on which comfortably to elevate
your feet above your head, stood all about. We entered a bare,
brick-floored dining-room, and partook of tropical fruits quite new to
us--papayes, mangoes, custard apples, pawpaws, and the small red eating
bananas too delicate for export. Overhead the punkahs swung back and
forth in lazy hypnotic rhythm. We could see the two blacks at the ends
of the punkah cords outside on the veranda, their bodies swaying lithely
in alternation as they threw their weight against the light ropes. Other
blacks, in the long white robes and exquisitely worked white skull caps
of the Swahili, glided noiselessly on bare feet, serving.

After dinner we sat out until midnight in the teakwood chairs of the
upper gallery, staring through the arches into the black, mysterious
night, for it was very hot, and we rather dreaded the necessary mosquito
veils as likely to prove stuffy. The mosquitoes are few in Mombasa, but
they are very deadly--very. At midnight the thermometer stood 87° F.

Our premonitions as to stuffiness were well justified. After a restless
night we came awake at daylight to the sound of a fine row of some sort
going on outside in the streets. Immediately we arose, threw aside the
lattices, and hung out over the sill.

The chalk-white road stretched before us. Opposite was a public square,
grown with brilliant flowers, and flowering trees. We could not doubt
the cause of the trouble. An Indian on a bicycle, hurrying to his
office, had knocked down a native child. Said child, quite naked, sat
in the middle of the white dust and howled to rend the heavens--whenever
he felt himself observed. If, however, the attention of the crowd
happened for the moment to be engrossed with the babu, the injured one