A little farther on we entered the shoe bazaar, where scores of merchants were selling red leather slippers turned up at the toes, and in a court not far away we found merchants selling hides and leather fresh from the tanneries. They were salting the hides in the square, and laying them out in the sun to dry. During my stay in this section I bought some ostrich feathers of a merchant who sold nothing else. He had a large stock and his prices were fixed. My feathers cost me about two dollars apiece, but they are the long white plumes of the wild ostrich, which are far finer than any of those from South Africa, where the birds are reared upon farms. In the Manchester bazaar I found them selling cottons of many kinds and calicoes of gay patterns. There were but few American goods among them, the chief importations being from England and Germany. I saw some American sewing machines in the bazaar of the tailors, and I understand that they are generally used throughout the Nile valley. A good deal of cotton is being grown throughout the Sudan nowadays and there is a whole street in Omdurman devoted to the manufacture and sale of the native product. This market at Omdurman serves a large district beyond the city, and consists of many little sheds covered with mats facing a dirt road. It is situated not far from the centre of the city, and there are several thousand acres of mud huts reaching out on all sides of it. Both the sheds and the streets are filled with cotton. It is brought in in bags of matting, and sold just as it is when picked from the plants. The samples are displayed in flat, round baskets, each of which holds perhaps a bushel; and when carried away it is put up in bags and not in bales. A great part of it goes to the native weavers, who turn it into cloth, using the smallest factories one can imagine. Not far from the street where the cotton is sold I found one of these tiny factories. The establishment consisted of a half-dozen mud huts, shut off from the street by a mud wall, which, with the huts, formed a court. In the court a dozen black-skinned women were sitting on mats on the ground, ginning and spinning, while the weaving went on in the huts at the back. The gin was somewhat like a clothes wringer save that the rolls were about as big around as the ordinary candle, and the whole machine was so small that it could have fitted into a peck measure. One woman turned the machine while another put in the cotton and picked out the seeds as they failed to go through. Near the gin sat two women who were snapping the lint with bowstrings to separate the fibres, and farther over there were a half-dozen others, sitting cross-legged, and spinning the lint into yarn by hand.