The way in which their industries come before our notice is like this. We take a walk in the country. By the side of some brook we find a man or two digging for iron ore. They are surrounded by companions with whom they keep up a cheerful conversation. Some are ready to assist in carrying the ore to the furnace. They carry clay also, which is to be plastered on their kiln. How are these loads to be transported? There are no carts, no wheelbarrows, and no roads suitable for either. Neither have they any boxes or baskets. What are they to do? One lad darts into the bush and cuts a bundle of wands; he then takes his knife and splits each wand (if he be not content to use it whole), and there, he says, is his basket. The white man replies, “Yes; these wands might make a basket if you had anything to tie them together”. Immediately the youth tears off strips of bark, and exclaims, “Here’s the black man’s rope,” and soon the load is tied up in the middle of his basket. As we pass along the stream we find indications of agricultural work also, but on these we do not dwell, as it is the more special trades we wish to illustrate. Already we see women washing their grain at the stream for we are advancing on little hamlets. Now we hear the peculiar tap, tap, tap of the hammer on the bark-cloth, as it mingles with the notes of the birds. Under the trees we can descry a group of men splitting up bamboos and smoothing the slips to form a bed. In a shaded verandah we find an old woman or two moulding some soft clay. It looks a shapeless mass, but it is “in the hands of the potter”. Each worker has found some ochre, for she is fond of ornamental tints. A potsherd is by her, and she has calculated the precise form she will give her vessel. [Illustration: NATIVE PIPES AND POTTERY.] Soon we reach the village green. Here we find a number of men sitting doing nothing. It may be that one is sewing a cloth, while the others loll upon mats and dreamily watch his hands. An ardent youth may approach the group and astonish us by taking from under his loin cloth a reel and some cotton, which he proceeds to make into thread. There are in that dark group all the elements of human nature that we find in busier lands. But in African life there is nothing of the bustle and hurry and scramble, nothing of the care and worry, the headache and heartache, that are found in England.