w it to
be a wood whose trees were covered with fresh leaves. The locusts had
eaten off all the first leaves three weeks before, and this was the
second crop. Such a wealth of intense yet delicate reds of all hues,
pink, crimson, and scarlet, sometimes passing into a flushed green,
sometimes into an umber brown, I have never seen, not even in the autumn
woods of North America, where, as on the mountain that overhangs
Montreal, the forest is aflame with the glow of the maples. The spring,
if one may give that name to the season of the first summer rains, is
for South Africa the time of colours, as is the autumn in our temperate
climes.

Mtali--it is often written "Umtali" to express that vague half-vowel
which comes at the beginning of so many words in the Bantu languages--is
a pretty little settlement in a valley whose sheltered position would
make it oppressive but for the strong easterly breeze which blows nearly
every day during the hot weather. There is plenty of good water in the
hills all round, and the higher slopes are green with fresh grass. The
town, like other towns in these regions, is constructed of corrugated
iron,--for wood is scarce and dear,--with a few brick-walled houses and
a fringe of native huts, while the outskirts are deformed by a thick
deposit of empty tins of preserved meat and petroleum. All the roofs are
of iron, and a prudent builder puts iron also into the foundation of the
walls beneath the brick, in order to circumvent the white ants. These
insects are one of the four plagues of South Central Africa. (The other
three are locusts, horse-sickness, and fever; some add a fifth--the
speculators in mining shares.) They destroy every scrap of organic
matter they can reach, and will even eat their way through brick to
reach wood or any other vegetable matter. Nothing but metal stops them.
They work in the dark, constructing a kind of tunnel or gallery if they
have to pass along an open space, as, for instance, to reach books upon
a shelf. (I was taken to see the public library at Mtali, and found they
had destroyed nearly half of it.) They are less than half an inch long,
of a dull greyish white, the queen, or female, about three times as
large as the others. Her quarters are in a sort of nest deep in the
ground, and if this nest can be found and destroyed, the plague will be
stayed, for a time at least. There are several other kinds of ants. The
small red ant gets among one's provisions and dev