The native in his raw state gained such an acquaintance with the languages of neighbouring tribes as to be able to communicate freely with them; and in many of their folk-lore stories there are sentences taken from other languages and scattered through the tales like French phrases in a fashionable novel. We have found, as a rule, that lads who came to us at fourteen or fifteen made very slow progress in our schools, and seldom reached the higher classes. They lost heart at their difficulties, and left school—there were exceptions, but such as only go to prove the rule. I think it would not be difficult to prove that English lads at the age of fourteen or fifteen need constant spurring by teacher, father, or guardian, or a much larger proportion of them would lose the knowledge they had acquired in their schools. When I had almost finished building the three-room bungalow in which I hoped to spend many years with my devoted wife, I began to build a kitchen, and the natives, seeing a smaller house being built in proximity to the larger one, said: “That is where the white man is going to put his wife, while he will, of course, live in the large house.” “No,” we answered; “that is the cook-house. My wife will live here in this house when she arrives.” “You would not be so foolish, white man,” they inquired, “as to put a woman in this fine house? You will send her to live in that small one, will you not?” And there was a certain amount of anxiety in their tones rather indicative of their fear that I was going to upset the proper order of domestic life by allowing a woman to live on equality with myself. They would scarcely believe me until they saw the stove fixed in the cook-house, and my wife installed with me on equal terms in what they called my “fine house,” which was only a three-roomed cottage with a verandah on two sides. The Boloki’s regard for women was a strange contradiction. I have seen them walking—man and wife—with their arms around each other’s waist, as though they were a couple of English lovers crossing a common in the twilight. I never saw natives exhibit so much fondling and affection for each other as was shown among those erstwhile cannibals. Ninety per cent of their quarrels were about women, for every man who had one or more wives bitterly resented any interference with his sole proprietorship in them. They would fondle their women, yet treat them contemptuously as inferiors; they would fight to assert their rights of ownership in them, yet regard them as so greatly beneath them as to send them to eat their food by themselves out of sight; and they would slave to collect sufficient goods to pay the marriage money for their free wives, or to procure the price of their slave wives, yet the former they would thrash unmercifully, and the latter, for a whim or in a fit of temper, they would murder and fling the corpse into the river, or invite their neighbours to feast with them on the body.