"Bulawayo,
"21/4/19.
"Honoured Sir,
"The enablement was not vouchsafed to me to indicate to Your Excellency the prodigious potentiality of the prophylactic applied with such consummate and conscientious technicality to my unostentatious tenement of clay. For full three weeks the taciturnity prescribed was obediently observed without difficulty or mutinousness of feeling. After which, rising from the slough of my despond, I found my multiloquence had returned fourfold, my linguacious allocution and discursive conversationalism prominently augmented. I then felt that my mission was not to the unenlightened ignoramusses of this neighbourhood but to the encyclopedical omnicients of the south. I have therefore returned to Bulawayo. Now here...."
As there were four closely written pages of this kind of thing, Warner turned to the last of them, which ended:
"Sir, I have the honour to be
"Your Honourable Excellency's most grateful, most humble, most obedient and unforgetful servant,
"Joseph Johnson."
Corrosive Sublimate.
Late one afternoon some natives carried an old man, wrapped in a blanket, into Warner's camp and laid him down on the ground before the tent. Warner came out.
"What is this?" he asked.