whole hill with its gigantic huts. Captain Speke
found it necessary, at first, to submit to much
ceremonial. On the first visit, he simply had the
honour of looking at his majesty. As evening
drew on, his majesty sent to ask the white man
whether he had seen him, and, on getting the
answer " Yes, for full one hour," he rose, spears
in hand, leading his white dog, and waddled
ceremoniously away, with a grotesque royal
gait, intended to imitate the outward sweep of
the hind legs in the stride of a lion. Captain
Speke had occasion to blister this terrible despot,
and made the acquaintance also of the convivial
queen-mother: who smoked her pipe, got
drunk upon pombé, and drank it like a pig out
of a trough when the small wooden cups ceased
to content her.

A creek of the Lake N'yanza, not very far from
the King of Uganda's palace, is named
Murchison Creek; and here across the mouth of a
deep rushy swamp is the royal yachting
establishment—the Cowes of Uganda. The king
set off for this Cowes without notice, a day
before the time he had appointed, expecting
everybody instantly to fall into his place. Seeing
a woman tied by the hands to be punished for
some offence, he combined business with
pleasure by firing at her and killing her. When
he was pic-nicking at his Cowes, he usually ate
with both hands, gnawing his meat like a dog;
and bits of gristle or meat that he found too
tough he pulled out of his mouth and gave to
his pages to eat as especial dainties. In the
course of three days' pleasure, they went to an
island in Lake N'yanza, where the spirit of the
lake, the Nile source, was supposed to dwell.
Here, one of the prettiest and best of the king's
wives, thinking to please him, offered him a
fruit that she had plucked. On which he flew
into a violent passion at the breach of etiquette,
and ordered her off to instant execution. The
other women appealed and implored, but the
king only became more brutal, and, taking a
heavy stick, beat his poor victim on the head
with it. Captain Speke, for the first time,
ventured to intercede, and the king smiled and
released the woman instantly.

At last, in July, 'sixty-two, after nearly six
months had been spent in Uganda, the king
granted the pass through Ungoro, and the
travellers departed. Some hostility was
provoked on the way by the native escort, and a
man was killed; but in a fortnight the actual
source of the Nile was reached, over hills and
through huge grasses and village plantations
that had been laid waste by the elephants.
From the broad lake, partly shut out from view
by a spur of hill, the water roars down a rock-
broken fall of about twelve feet deep, and four
or five hundred feet broad, where the passenger-
fish leap, and the Wasoga and Waganda fishermen
plant themselves with rod and hook on all
convenient spots. Above the falls—Ripon
Falls—is a ferry. Below them, the cattle come
down to drink; the hippopotamus and crocodile
lie lazily upon the water. Around are grass-
topped hills, with gardens on the slopes, and
wooded valleys. So, flows the great Nile stream
from the Lake N'yanza; its remotest source, or
top head, being at the other end of the lake,
close on the third degree of south latitude.
This makes the whole length of the Nile two
thousand three hundred miles, or more than an
eleventh part of the whole round of the globe.

TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF.

AFTER a whole winter spent in studying art at
Rome, I had come down, sitting bodkin between
two Germans in a cheap vetturino carriage, to
study nature at Naples. I was so sick of huge
picture-galleries, hired models, and the gossip of
the studios, that I thought it would be a relief
to paint landscape for a change: so I said to
others, and so I said to myself; but my own
heart contradicted me. I knew very well, in my
innermost soul, that it was in bitterness of spirit
that I left Rome, unable to bear the sight of
other men's prosperity. It stung me to see men
whom I knew, to be inferior to myself in taste,
in knowledge of colour, in originality, in everything
but a plodding, stolid industry, pass me in
the race of life. This is a cold, hard, work-a-day
century of ours, an age without sympathy for
the flaws and failings of genius, and measuring
all capacities by the same pitiful little foot-rule
of the results attained to.

And so I went to Naples; and, when the heats
of the sultry Italian summer came on, led a
roving life among the coast towns and petty
watering-places within reach of the great city,
now at Portici, now at Sorrento, and then
dawdling away weeks at Salerno or Castelamare.
A lazy, good-for-nothing life it was; a life of
castle-building, of regrets that I tried to banish,
and of hopes that I knew could never blossom
into realities. I was still young, not four-and-
twenty, but I thought I had a right to consider
myself a disappointed man. Doubly disappointed.
First, because I had not met with
encouragement from connoisseurs and the public.
Secondly, because Lucy Graham, dear little
Lucy, whom I loved and had loved for years,
and who would have shared my poverty
unmurmuringly, was not to be my wife. Her relations
were wise, forsooth. " They could not hear,"
they said, " of the dear girl's throwing herself
away upon an idle, purposeless man, who would
drag her down with him into the mire of merited
poverty." How false and selfish such reasoning
was! They might have known—Lucy's aunt
and Lucy's brother, to whose will her gentle
nature deferred—that with such an inducement,
such a talisman, as her love and her welfare
depending on my toil, I should have done fifty
times as much as I had ever achieved without
such a spur to exertion.

A penniless artist cannot live, even in that
country, always cheap to those whose wants are
few, without work. I, therefore, worked; but in
an unambitious fashion that did not task my
patience overmuch. Coloured sketches of