ne pair of socks, pays a heavy penalty to this little
flea, that dying still has power to hurt. Dirt and the death of this
tiny visitor result in painful feet that make of marching a very
torture. So great a pest is this that at least five per cent. of our
army, both white and native, are constantly incapacitated. Hundreds of
toenails have I removed for this cause alone. Nor do the jiggers come
singly, but in battalions, and often as many as fifty have to be removed
from one wretched soldier's feet and legs. So we hang our socks upon our
mosquito nets and take our boots to bed with us, nor do we venture to
put bare feet upon the ground.

A yell in the sleeping camp at night, "Some damn thing's bit me;" and
matches are struck, while a sleepy warrior hunts through his blankets
for the soldier ant whose great pincers draw blood, or lurking centipede
or scorpion. For in these dry, hot, dusty countries these nightly
visitors come to share the warm softness of the army blanket. Next
morning, sick and shivering, they come to show to me the hot red flesh
or swollen limb with which the night wanderer has rewarded his
involuntary host.

NIGHT IN MOROGORO

There's nothing quite so wideawake as a tropical night in Africa. At
dawn the African dove commences with his long-drawn note like a boy
blowing over the top of a bottle, one bird calling to another from the
palms and mango trees. Then the early morning songsters wake.

There is no libel more grossly unfair than that which says the birds of
Africa have no song. The yellow weaver birds sing most beautifully, as
they fly from the feathery tops of the avenue of coconut palms that line
the road to the clump of bamboos behind the hospital.

But they fly there no longer now, for our colonel, in a spasm of
sanitation, cut down this graceful swaying clump of striped bamboos for
the fear that they harboured mosquitoes. As if these few canes mattered,
when our hospital was on the banks of the reed-fringed river. Morning
songsters with voices of English thrushes and robins wake one to gaze
upon the dawn through one's mosquito net. Small bird voices, like the
chiff-chaff in May, carry on the chorus until the sun rises. Then the
bird of delirium arrives and runs up the scale to a high monotonous note
that would drive one mad, were it not that he and the dove, with his
amphoric note, are Africa all over. A neat fawn-coloured bird this, with
a long tail and dark markings on his wi