_Vegetables._--A free supply of these is essential to healthy nutrition in all climates, and especially so in the Tropics, where it is desirable to restrict the amount of meat consumed. English folk might with great advantage take lessons from our neighbours across the channel, by introducing to their tables _plats_ of vegetables served up alone, and flavoured with some tasty stock, or with simply a little butter. Well cooked, and served piping hot, such dishes are most tempting and wholesome, and may most advantageously take the place of meat dishes at the mid-day meal in hot climates; besides which it is as great a mistake to mask the delicate flavour of early peas and French beans by eating them with meat, as it would be to try to appreciate the flavour of a vintage claret under like circumstances. Where vegetables are scarce, it is well to investigate the dietary of the native races amongst whom one lives, as even in long-settled colonies it is astonishing how often excellent articles of food are entirely neglected by European residents. Served up as _haricots verts_, the soy bean (_Glycine soja_) or the lablab bean (_Dolichos lablab_) cut at the same stage of maturity, as is customary with the ordinary French bean, are excellent and are specially valuable, as they come on at a time when little else is obtainable; but in spite of this, they are very rarely eaten by Europeans. Then too a great variety of succulent leaf plants form an excellent substitute for spinach, and a variety of herbs, wild or cultivated, suitable for serving up in this way, are usually known to the indigenous inhabitants of any country; the very young tops of gram (_Cicer arietinaum_), for example, are excellent eating. During the Cgaleka campaign, the troops were often for long periods quite without vegetables, and one day the writer, wandering among the kraals near the camp, found some Kaffir women busily gathering a wild plant with small succulent leaves. On discovering that they were picking it for food, a basketful was purchased from them, and when cooked, furnished an excellent dish, almost indistinguishable from genuine spinach. Arrangements were then made to supply the entire detachment once or twice a week; and the men remained throughout the year entirely free from scurvy, a disease which has nearly always given rise to a certain amount of trouble in prolonged military operations in that part of the world, and notably in the Boer concentration camps during the late war.