Make careful drawings of your encampment, your retinue, and whatever else you may in indolence have omitted to sketch, that will possess an after-interest.  Look over your vocabularies for the last time, and complete them as far as possible.  Make presents of all your travelling gear and old guns to your native attendants, for they will be mere litter in England, costly to house and attractive to moth and rust; while in the country where you have been travelling, they are of acknowledged value, and would be additionally acceptable as keepsakes.

Memoranda, to arrange.—­Paste all loose slips of MSS. into the pages of a blank book; and stitch your memoranda books where they are torn; give them to a bookbinder, at the first opportunity, to re-bind and page them, adding an abundance of blank leaves.  Write an index to the whole of your MSS.; put plenty of cross-references, insert necessary explanations, and supplement imperfect descriptions, while your memory of the events remains fresh.  It appears impossible to a traveller, at the close of his journey, to believe he will ever forget its events, however trivial; for after long brooding on few facts, they will seem to be fairly branded into his memory.  But this is not the case; for the crowds of new impressions, during a few months or years of civilised life, will efface the sharpness of the old ones.  I have conversed with men of low mental power, servants and others, the greater part of whose experiences in savagedom had passed out of their memories like the events of a dream.

Alphabetical Lists.—­Every explorer has frequent occasion to draw up long catalogues in alphabetical order, whether of words for vocabularies, or of things that he has in store:  now, there is a right and a wrong way of setting to work to make them.  The wrong way is to divide the paper into equal parts, and to assign one of them to each letter in order.  The right way is to divide the paper into parts of a size proportionate to the number of words in the English language which begin with each particular letter.  In the first case the paper will be overcrowded in some parts and utterly blank in others, in the second it will be equally overspread with writing; and an ordinary-sized sheet of paper, if closely and clearly written, will be sufficient for the drawing up of a very extended catalogue.  A convenient way of carrying out the principle I have indicated is to take an English dictionary, and after having divided the paper into as many equal parts as there are leaves in the dictionary, to adopt the first word of each leaf as headings to them.  It may save trouble to my reader if I give a list of headings appropriate to a small catalogue.  We will suppose the paper to be divided into fifty-two spaces—­that is to say, into four columns and thirteen spaces in each column—­then the headings of these spaces, in order, will be as follows:—­