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Then I've got to hire some drivers and some porters, camp-makers and the like. In fact we'll have quite a party. I guess I'll need ten natives, and a head man and with ourselves we'll be fifteen. So we'll need plenty of food. But then we can get that as we go along, except when we get away into the interior, and then we'll have to hunt it ourselves." "That's the stuff!" cried Ned.

While he was standing, with palpitating heart, behind that door in the booking office, George was in the porters' room, not a hundred yards off, waiting with deeper anxiety for the clock to point to the hour when the train should start. Presently, the first bell rang. A number of people, with bags and packages in hand, came crowding up to the ticket office, but George was not there.

He found that the harbour was covered with boats carrying out hogs, fowls, vegetables, and water, according to his orders: but no baggage had been sent down from the quarters of the French officials, though porters had been waiting for two hours past. Scouts had come in, with news of the approach of the insurgents.

Sometimes porters came and took away this case and the other, a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a dead chamois. Every time the men trampled near him, and swore at each other, and banged this and that to and fro, he was so frightened that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came to lift the stove out, would they find him? and if they did find him, would they kill him?

The porters were asleep in the streets on the thresholds of the houses; the shadows of the colossuses stretched across the deserted squares; occasionally in the distance the smoke of a still burning sacrifice would escape through the bronze tiling, and the heavy breeze would waft the odours of aromatics blended with the scent of the sea and the exhalation from the sun-heated walls.

And the further direction is given that "the seat of learning is now removed from the corner of the chimney on the left towards the window, to the round table in the middle of the floor over against the fire; a revolution much lamented by the porters and chairmen, who were much edified through a pane of glass that remained broken all last summer."

The average wages of workingmen was at least one half less than is paid in England for the same service at the present day. One fifth of the people were paupers, or recipients of parish relief. Clothing and bedding were scarce and dear. Education was almost unknown to the vast majority. The houses and shops were not numbered in the cities, for porters, coachmen, and errand-runners could not read.

But now, precisely the same scene produced on me an entirely different effect; I experienced, in the first place, a malevolent feeling towards many of those who were besieging me; and in the second place, uneasiness as to what the shopkeepers and porters would think of me. On my return home that day, I was troubled in my soul. I felt that what I had done was foolish and immoral.

Mahamed, like the black chiefs, wished to detain the travellers, that they and their party might guard his camp, while he went off on an expedition on his own account. He succeeded by depriving them of their porters, and then marched out with his army drums and fifes playing, colours flying, guns firing, officers riding, some on donkeys, others on cows.

One day we all set out to make our discoveries: F., B., and I with our gunbearers, Memba Sasa, Mavrouki, and Simba, and ten porters to bring in the trophies, which we wanted very much, and the meat, which the men wanted still more. We rode our horses, and the syces followed. This made quite a field force-nineteen men all told.