ance! entering a man's house as a guest, and claiming his premises as your own!]

2. "The Lake Victoria Nyanza had been partially explored; not thoroughly, owing to my helpless and almost dying condition at the time."

Nyanza explored! Much as a hospital patient would explore Cape Cod bay or the Chesapeake by paddling a day in the harbor of Boston or Baltimore !

The sum of this Americano-Egyptian traveler's observations is that "Central Africa is no paradise, but a plague-spot, and that the negro, the product of this pestilential region, is a miserable wretch, often devoid of all tradition or belief in a Deity, which enthusiastic travelers have endeavored to endow him with. This is the naked truth, in contradiction to all those clap-trap peans which are sung of this benighted country."

From these dismal views we turn to the more hopeful Stanley. His title is shadowy-" Through the Dark Continent" -but his pages are sunshine. Few men are more sanguine, cheery, and full of abounding life, than Henry M. Stanley. The exuberance of his spirits communicates itself to his style, which is rather that of the off-hand newspaper reporter than of the thoughtful book-maker for the reading of thoughtful men. Descriptive, overflowing with good feeling, conversational, declamatory, dramatic, and poetic by turns, his is just the style for popular use, while the grand achievements to which he was providentially led would atone for any defect in the telling, and make stupidity itself eloquence. His "tale would cure deafness."

The definite settlement of the Nile sources, the open problem of twenty centuries, and the determination of the course of the Congo, known only at its mouth for the last four hundred years, are the great geographical feats of the century. They place Stanley in the first rank of explorers. A traveler needs two things-power to see, and power to make others see what he has seen; and both these Stanley possesses in a remarkable degree. Favorable circumstances and a rare combination of personal endowments have made of a New York newspaper reporter the foremost African discoverer of the age. A holiday expedition with General Napier to Magdala, the mountain

stronghold of the fierce Theodore in 1868, his trip in search of Livingstone to Ujiji in 1871, his venturous raid with Sir Garnet Wolseley into malarial Coomassie in 1873, were Stanley's apprenticeship in African travel, customs, climate, and adventure.

It is one of the incidents of the times that an enterprise which in former times would have required the patronage of royalty and princely treasures was boldly undertaken by a couple of daily newspapers. Bennett, of the "Herald,” spent twenty thousand dollars in the expedition to find Livingstone. In May, 1873, Livingstone died on the southern shore of Lake Bangweolo,* and a year later his remains were buried in Westminster Abbey. Stanley was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral, and here we have the inception of his last great enterprise. The first few sentences of "Through the Dark Continent" tell the story of the inspiration, how he caught the falling mantle of his revered predecessor and model. Livingstone was Stanley's ideal moral hero. All through his volumes one cannot help noticing how thoroughly the sturdy Scotchman had impressed himself upon the sanguine and enthusiastic young American. The half-divine man of your imagination draws to himself your love and reverence, molds your being, shapes your future, invests your spirit with his spirit, becomes one of whom you think at every new fork in the highway of life, and of whom you ask, as Stanley was ever asking of Livingstone, "What would he think of my course, and which road would he in similar circumstances have chosen?" Stanley writes: "Livingstone was dead, and the effect which this news had upon me was to fire me with a resolution to complete his work. I bought over a hundred and thirty books on Africa, and studied the subject night and day with the zeal of a living interest and the understanding of one who had already been four times on the continent."

Zeal is infectious, and the editor of the "London Daily Telegraph" caught a portion of Stanley's enthusiasm, the result of which was consultation with the "New York Herald," and the origination of an expedition with three specific objects in view: 1. To explore and map Lake Victoria Nyanza, and con

*Long, with his accustomed accuracy in African matters, writes the name of Lake Bemba "Bageolowe."

nect its waters with the Nile, not by hearsay and conjecture, as heretofore, but by positive information. 2. To finish the coast circuit of Lake Tanganyika, and settle the question of outlet. 3. To follow Livingstone's Lualaba, and see whether it eventuated in the Nile, in the sands of the desert, in some central lake, or in the Congo, each of which had been conjectured or foretold by easy-chair, stay-at-home geographers, whom Livingstone sarcastically calls "theoretical discoverers" and Speke "hypothetical humbugs." No expedition, except perhaps Baker's, at the expense of the creditors of the lavish Khedive, was ever more generously fitted out. For his march to Ujiji, in 1871, Stanley started with six tons of African pocket money, wire, cloth, beads, etc., loads for one hundred and sixty porters. In 1874 the total weight of goods, stores, tents, ammunition, boat and fixtures, photographic apparatus, scientific instruments, and articles too numerous to mention, was over eighteen thousand pounds, nine tons, requiring three hundred carriers. In the absence of the trained elephant, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, Africa's own hints at future burden-bearers, human porters, supplemented by a few asses, are the traveler's only dependence, his prime necessity. In the Anglo-American expedition, as it set out from the coast, were six riding asses, five dogs, thirty-six women, wives of porters or soldiers, ten boys, three Europeans, Fred. Barker, Frank and Edward Pococke, (Thames boatmen,) soldiers, and porters-in all three hundred and fifty-six souls. Stanley is his own historian. Making all due allowance for the sanguine pen of a good-natured, goodhearted, imaginative young man, bubbling over with philanthropy and thoroughly saturated with reverence for Livingstone, bound to make the best of every thing and to tell the best side of every story, the reader of Stanley cannot help feeling, in view of what he accomplishes, that he is a born organizer, a brave and skillful leader, Bonapartish in rapid decision, energy and skill, and Wellingtonian in his power and management of detail. With all the resources of modern science and invention at his disposal, he is to act the scientific explorer; to mark the course and rate of travel; the course, depth, and velocity of rivers; the geology, geography, botany, and natural history of the countries traversed: he has to be astronomer, linguist, photographer, cartographer, meteorologist, journalist,

doctor, nurse, director of all, sympathizer with all, father of all, brains for all. Above all, he is to bear a charmed life, one of those favored ones whom Providence permits to open new doors to human knowledge, who succeed where others have failed, and who are immortal till their special mission is accomplished. Discovery is successional. Revelation is an eternal process. Not to any one man is it vouchsafed to turn more than a single leaf, to show his fellows more than a single new page. Livingstone, the prince of African explorers, spent as many years on the continent as others spent months, and died, a veteran, with his hands full of works completed, and as many problems unsolved. Neither Livingstone nor Cameron could get beyond Nyangwé. Stanley was commissioned to bear a torch "through the Dark Continent." The five small maps with which his volume opens tell the whole story of African discovery for the last two hundred years. They show how crude were our ideas of inner Africa down to the last twenty years, and how rapidly discoveries have multiplied within that period.

Starting from Bagamoyo November 17, 1874, Stanley followed the beaten track toward Ujiji till he reached Ugogo, two hundred and eighty miles from Zanzibar, and then (January 1, 1875) struck off to the north-east, in the direction of the Victoria Nyanza. Here the expedition met the first severe penalties of African travel. "The cold winds, chilly atmosphere, feverish feeling, the extortions of the natives and their insolence, all combine to render the land of Ugogo hateful and bitter to the mind."-Vol. ii, p. 517. Just two months from the date of starting they experienced their first severe reverse in the death of young Edward Pococke. A week later, in the midst of sore famine and distressing sickness, they were attacked by the natives of Ituru, and lost twenty-one men in a single day. Stanley prefaces his account of this "three days' fight" with the remark, often repeated in substance, "We were strong disciples of the doctrine of forbearance, for it seemed to me then as if Livingstone had taught it to me only the day before."

The 27th of February they entered a "wretched-looking, rude village" on the borders of the lake, where, after making his men comfortable in camp, under the control of Fred. Barker and Frank Pococke, and enlisting a crew for the "Lady

Alice" of ten men and a steersman, Stanley boldly set out on a voyage to trace the outline of the unknown lake. Coasting along the southern shore, the first important object was the mouth of the Shimeeyu River, "the extreme southern reach of the Nile waters." The total length of this southern and second principal affluent of the Nyanza, "as laid out on the chart, is three hundred miles, which gives the course of the Nile a length of four thousand two hundred miles: making it the second longest river in the world." The whole of the month of March was consumed in coasting along the eastern and north-eastern portion of the lake, and, after a variety of adventures and a skirmish or two with hostile natives, the voyagers reached Ripon Falls and saw the northern outlet of the lake into the Nile, and shortly after entered Uganda, the empire of Mtesa, where, says Stanley, the voyager "is as safe and as free from care as though he were in the most civilized State in Europe."

Mtesa and his subjects appear to have been a genuine surprise to Stanley, and his stay and seven months' acquaintance with this "extraordinary monarch and extraordinary people" an agreeable episode, quite unexpected, and not thought of in his original programme. After months of intercourse with pure barbarians, scantily clothed or absolutely naked, armed with spears or bows and arrows only, he comes suddenly upon "six beautiful canoes," manned with rowers "dressed in white," the commander arrayed in "a bead head-dress, above which a long cock's feather waved, and a snowy white and long-haired goatskin, while a crimson robe depending from his shoulders completed his full dress." "As we neared the beach volleys of musketry burst out from long lines of military dressed in crimson and black and snowy white, while two hundred or three hundred heavily loaded guns announced to all around that the white man had landed." "Numerous kettle and bass drums sounded a noisy welcome, and flags and banners and bannerets waved," and "thousands of people" " gave a great shout." He is naturally "very much amazed at all this ceremonious and pompous greeting."

Linant's reception, a week later, described by himself, was similar to Stanley's. "On entering the court of Mtesa's palace I am greeted with a frightful uproar, a thousand instruments,