[Illustration: John Bull designs his public buildings in Africa with a view to making an impression on the native. His Majesty’s High Court of Kenya Colony, sitting at Mombasa, administers both British and Koranic laws.] The horses are fairly good here, but the charges for them are steep. When I ride out on horseback it costs me a dollar and sixty-five cents an hour, and the carriage rates are still higher. The best way to get about is in the jinrikishas, using the natives as beasts of burden, but for a long ride over the plains horses are necessary. The heavy hauling of this part of East Africa is done mostly by the sacred cattle of India. I mean the clean-cut animals with great humps on their backs. They are fine-looking and are apparently well-bred. Some of these beasts are hitched to American wagons brought out here from Wisconsin. I saw such a team hauling a Kentucky plough through the streets of Nairobi yesterday. Indeed, I find that American goods are slowly making their way into these wilds. American axes and sewing machines, and American sowers and planters are sold by the East Indians. The drug stores carry our patent medicines and every market has more or less American cottons. The wood cutters are using American axes, but they complain of the flat or oval holes made for the handles. They say that a round hole would be better, as the natives who do the wood cutting are very clumsy and the handles snap off at the axe. If round holes were used, heavier handles could be put in and the Negroes could make them themselves. Nairobi promises to become one of the railroad centres of this part of the world. It is the chief station between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria, and a road is now proposed from here to Mt. Kenya. The Uganda Railway goes through some of the poorest country in the colony, and the Mt. Kenya road will open up a rich agricultural region which is thickly populated by tribes more than ordinarily industrious. The railroad shops are here, and the employees have a large collection of tin cottages for their homes. The headquarters of the railroad, where the chief officers stay, are one-story tin buildings. The telegraphic offices are connected with them. Both railroad and telegraph are run by the government. The telegraphic rates are comparatively low. Far off here in the jungles of Africa one can send messages much more cheaply than in the United States. A message of eight words from here to Uganda costs thirty-three cents, and one can telegraph to London about as cheaply as from New York to San Francisco. This is so notwithstanding the difficulty which the linemen have to keep up the wires, which the jewellery-loving natives steal. During the Nandi rebellion, forty-odd miles of it were carried away and never recovered, and in one of the provinces adjoining Uganda, above Lake Victoria, the natives are so crazy after the copper wire there used that it is almost impossible to keep the lines in shape.