Much is said against the African on account of his laziness. At Quilimane I was told that it was common for natives to choose starvation rather than work. Cases were pointed to, where negroes had died of hunger, while work and food had been offered them. I was pleased, therefore, to find the boys coming to tell me that they wanted work. Still much of this was due to the Mission discipline. The boarders had been put under a native teacher, who sent boys that did no work, away from the table. My first acquaintance with the subject was when this young lad came to me and said, “Master, this is not right at all, boys that do no work come and take away the boarder’s food!” Hence there was established for a long time a tacit understanding, that he that “would not work, should not eat,” and it was only when the usual organisation was disturbed, that the whole of the school boys would make an onslaught on the boarders’ food. At first few boys cared to engage in the little tasks assigned for the boarders. Their parents advised them against working; they reasoned, “If our children go to Blantyre and do work, there will be no work left for ourselves, and we shall get no calico”. They would also say, “When our children do work for the English, and get food and clothes from them, this is the same as being slaves to the English, and one day the English will take our children from us”. Sometimes, on the other hand, it was made an objection against the Mission that the pupils did too little. I was once told that children sent to school would become lazy. This criticism from a native, who gets credit for being the laziest dog in existence, rather astonished me, but it brought the hard lot of the African female clearly before my notice. Frequently little girls were absent from school, and my plan was never to let an absence pass without explanation, and I generally found that they had been helping their mothers to pound the corn. But as prizes depended on regular attendance, the girls were anxious to be present every day, and consequently they became less useful at home, while the parents naturally regarded reading and sewing (by females) as mere pastimes. It might have been better if we could have professed to teach girls to pound corn! Few will say that laziness is a sin of the African female. The pounding of corn is as hard work as any woman need try. On this department of toil I have often looked with sadness, while I wished that I had known some simple mechanical device for lightening the task. Such a device would greatly improve the lot of the African woman, and were her labour thus lightened, it would be easier to persuade the men to assist her. I once suggested to a young lad that he ought to aid his mother in pounding the grain; but although he was fond of his mother, he felt that this method of assisting her would appear ridiculous. A man pounding corn would be as strange a spectacle to a native of Central Africa as a woman