In the present case the Tabaski fête passed over quietly enough. We regaled our visitors with a little apparently impromptu fusillade, which we had really agreed upon beforehand amongst ourselves, giving the Koyraberos from Talibia a demonstration of the penetrating force of our bullets on the branches of some trees. “_Bissimilaye! Bissimilaye!_” cried old Suleyman Foutanké, hardly able to believe his own eyes. _June._—No rain at Say yet! It really looks as if we had cast a spell upon the place, the more so that the want of rain was accompanied by a plague of locusts. We had invoked the aid of Moses against our enemies, and now, like him, I had brought upon the natives of the land of our exile clouds of locusts to devour all green things. The people were in despair. A drought and locusts together meant perhaps the complete destruction of the harvest. But there is always some good in everything, and the Koyraberos flung themselves, armed with sticks, into the thickest part of the swarms, beating down the insects, which were picked up by the children, and stowed away in their _bubus_. Fried and seasoned, the locusts made a very appetizing change of diet. Our men from Senegal, however, made great fun of those who ate them; they were themselves much too civilized for such food as that. “The Koyraberos,” Digui said to me, “are regular savages!” and it was worth something to hear the tone of contempt in which he gave utterance to this insulting remark. The chief of Kibtachi, a big Haussa village down-stream, sent us various presents and made many promises to us. He also begged us most politely to visit him when we passed later. “Why,” he said, “did you not come to Kibtachi to begin with, instead of stopping with Saturu, who wishes you no good?” Talking of presents, Galadio, when he returned the signed treaty, sent a wonderful collection of gifts, including kola nuts, symbolic of friendship, with calabashes full of honey, and bags of baobab flour, the medicinal effect of the two being totally different, the honey acting as an emollient, the flour as an irritant. The chiefs of the Sidibés, Kurteyes, Sillabés, etc., all vied with each other now in sending messengers to us to assure us of their friendship, and yet another notable, chief of the Torodi Fulahs, asked us to make just such a treaty with him as we had with his friend Galadio. “Galadio and I,” he wrote to us, “are together like two teeth of the same comb!” A happy metaphor indeed, a regular literary gem! Yes, indeed, they all belonged to the same comb, these native friends of ours, and as yet we did not suspect how very dirty that comb was.