Sometimes alterations are made at my suggestion, and then they believe that they can cook in thorough white man's fashion.

The cook always comes in for something left in the pot, so all are eager to obtain the office.
I taught several of them to wash my shirts, and they did it well, though their teacher had never been taught that work himself.

Frequent changes of linen and sunning of my blanket kept me more comfortable than might have been anticipated, and I feel certain that the lessons of cleanliness rigidly instilled by my mother in childhood helped to maintain that respect which these people entertain for European ways.
It is questionable if a descent to barbarous ways ever elevates a man in the eyes of savages.
When quite beyond the inhabited parts, we found the country abounding in animal life of every form.

There are upward of thirty species of birds on the river itself.

Hundreds of the 'Ibis religiosa' come down the Leeambye with the rising water, as they do on the Nile; then large white pelicans, in flocks of three hundred at a time, following each other in long extending line, rising and falling as they fly so regularly all along as to look like an extended coil of birds; clouds of a black shell-eating bird, called linongolo ('Anastomus lamelligerus'); also plovers, snipes, curlews, and herons without number.
There are, besides the more common, some strange varieties.