Speaking of the possibilities of this East African colony, it may be one of the coffee lands of the future. Several plantations which have been set out not far from here are doing well. There is one coffee estate within five miles of Nairobi which belongs to the Catholic Mission of the Holy Ghost. Yesterday I rode out on horseback over the prairie to have a look at it. The way to the estate is through fenced fields, which are spotted here and there with the sheet-iron cottages of English settlers. As I rode on I saw many humped cattle grazing in the pastures. The grass is everywhere tall and thick, and the red soil, although not much cultivated as yet, seems rich. Arriving at the plantation, I was met by Father Tom Burke and walked with him through his coffee plantation. It covers something like fifteen acres, and has now more than eight thousand trees in full bearing. The yield is so good that the plantation is supplying not only the town of Nairobi with all the coffee it needs, but is shipping several tons every year to Europe. Father Burke tells me that the coffee trees begin to bear at a year and a half, and that they are in full bearing within about four years. As the ripening season is long, the berries have to be picked many times. I saw blossoms and green and ripe berries on the same tree. In one place the natives were picking, at another they were hoeing the plants, while in a third place they were pulping the berries in a pulper turned by hand. The trees seem thrifty. Father Burke says that the young plants grow easily, and that where the birds carry the berries away and drop the seeds the plants will sprout up of themselves. There is a plantation near by of thirty thousand trees, and I am told that there is a fair prospect of a considerable coffee industry springing up. [Illustration: Contact with the white man’s institutions of work, wages, and money usually leads to an interest in clothing. The demand from East Africa will some day add millions of yards of cotton cloth to the output of American mills.] [Illustration: The Kikuyus are highlanders and number more than a million. The men coat their bodies and fill their hair with rancid fat and coloured clay, giving themselves a weird appearance and a worse smell.] [Illustration: Cattle are the wealth of such tribes as the Masai, who own great numbers of them. The young men especially covet them, for cattle buy them brides. Sometimes the horns measure fifty-four inches from tip to tip.]