ioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance;
there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant
wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private
tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant
seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to
whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out
shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in
order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming
behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and
switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step would be to
place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is
not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved
for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend
them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of
Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the
most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.

[Illustration: Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira.]

Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of
feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some
of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of
Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on
the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions,
and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was
necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build
a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in
operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the
brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress
through the marshes, two hundred of the men working on it died of
fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the
Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the
Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this
was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied,
Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of "Judson and the
Empire." It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored
it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A
week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all
the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had
made no mention of the fa