propose to start westwards on Monday the 4th, or Tuesday the 5th. My
sepoys offered Ali eight rupees to take them to the coast, thus it
has been a regularly organized conspiracy.

From the appearance of the cow-buffalo, I fear the tsetse is its chief
enemy, but there is a place like a bayonet wound on its shoulder, and
many of the wounds or bruises on the camels were so probed that I
suspect the sepoys.

Many things African are possessed of as great vitality in their line
as the African people. The white ant was imported accidentally into
St. Helena from the coast of Guinea, and has committed such ravages in
the town of St. James, that numerous people have been ruined, and the
governor calls out for aid against them. In other so-called new
countries a wave of English weeds follows the tide of English
emigration, and so with insects; the European house-fly chases away
the blue-bottle fly in New Zealand. Settlers have carried the
house-fly in bottles and boxes for their new locations, but what
European insect will follow us and extirpate the tsetse? The Arabs
have given the Makondé bugs, but we have the house-fly wherever we go,
the blue-bottle and another like the house-fly, but with a sharp
proboscis; and several enormous gad-flies. Here there is so much room
for everything. In New Zealand the Norwegian rat is driven off by even
the European mouse; not to mention the Hanoverian rat of Waterton,
which is lord of the land. The Maori say that "as the white man's rat
has driven away the native rat, so the European fly drives away our
own; and as the clover kills our fern, so will the Maori disappear
before the white man himself." The hog placed ashore by Captain Cook
has now overrun one side of the island, and is such a nuisance that a
large farmer of 100,000 acres has given sixpence per head for the