The present story completes a series of three books in which I have endeavoured to give impressions of life in the immense region known as Equatorial Africa. The scene of Tom Burnaby was laid in the centre, around the great lakes; Samba was concerned with the western or Congo districts; Settlers and Scouts is a story of the east, more especially the magnificent highland region which seems destined to become one of the greatest provinces of the British African Empire.

The steady stream of emigration already flowing to British East Africa is bound to swell when it is more generally recognized that in the hill districts of Kenya, Naivasha, and Kisumu there are vast areas of agricultural land constituting an ideal "white man's country." In the following pages I have attempted to show some of the conditions under which the pioneers of emigration must work. The development of communications and the settlement of the remoter regions will soon relegate such alarums and excursions as are here described to the romantic possibilities of the past. But it will be long before the lion, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and other more or less formidable neighbours cease to be factors with which the emigrant has to reckon.

For many facts, stranger by far than fiction, concerning the wild inhabitants, human and other, of this most interesting region, I am indebted to Mr. Arkell-Hardwick's An Ivory Trader in North Kenya and Colonel Patterson's Man-Eaters of Tsavo, among several important works that have appeared during recent years.

It may be added that in the spelling of native names I have sometimes rather consulted the reader's convenience than conformed strictly to rule. The name Wanderobbo, for instance, applied to an individual, is a solecism, the prefix Wa being a sign of the plural. But it seemed better to err than to afflict the reader with so uncouth a form as N'derobbo.