SO far as can be ascertained by the maps of a country that has hardly been mapped, we lie at a point about halfway between the middle of Lake Victoria Nyanza and the volcano Kilimanjaro.

For ten years past, the surrounding country for one hundred miles has been almost the exclusive hunting grounds of Simson, one of the very few people who knows the route in and the location of water holes.

He has constructed a permanent camp near a small stream called the Sironera River, and has built there some twenty native huts. They are a picturesque collection of dwellings, with walls of wattle, composed of small sticks and mud, and the roofs of poles bound with strips of bark and reeds, thatched heavily with marsh grass.

I sit in one of these Bandas now, writing this epistle, while Simson and White have gone out on the veldt for camp meat and Arthur Young has taken his bow and sallied forth in quest of adventure.

We have finished our morning hunt and the afternoon is at our own disposal.

In camp there are about forty natives, including a headman called Mdolo, who served his apprenticeship with the famous elephant hunter Cunninghame;

and a gun bearer named Kazimoto, which translated means "hot worker," for it seems that these natives give themselves advertising names descriptive of their alleged virtues.

There are besides cooks and kitchen assistants, runaway boys from the nearest village of Ikoma, thirty-five miles off; skinners, water carriers, porters, tent boys and what not. There is not a woman this side of Ikoma. Every once in a while, however, there is an urgent demand for wages among the younger natives;

some mother has just died, or some dire sickness has fallen upon the victim and causes him to seek his home in Ikoma; otherwise it is a strictly masculine kingdom. We call it Simson's Principality.

We have two large huts for our own sleeping quarters and a half enclosed lounge or dining room, where we sit after meals and discuss hunting, or play music when the day is done. Apollo was a musician as well as an archer, you may recall, so like him each of us has a little stringed instrument that is small enough .to be rolled up in his blankets; a violin, a mandolin, and a guitar.

In the evenings, under the stars, or by the camp fire, we play sweet harmonies together, greatly to the delectation of our souls.

There is much formality to the service rendered by our personal servants. Our valet makes beds, provides baths, waits at table, unlaces our boots and renders other services that confuse and humiliate an American. The gun bearer, or, properly, archery bearer, besides packing an extra quiver of arrows for each of us, carries a canteen of water and a camera, chases our arrows, sharpens them with a file and in camp keeps busy cutting feathers for arrow shafts and cleaning our outfit.