At 2 P.M. entered the town of Baebaegie. I rode to the house of the governor, whose head man gave me a part of his house to lodge in; and shortly after I had halted he sent me a sheep, two fowls, some wheat, the first I had seen since I left England, and plenty of millet for my horses and camel. I sent him in return a knife, six yards of red silk, a gilt chain, and a pair of scissars. In the evening the governor sent me pudding, boiled rice, milk, and stewed meat. Wednesday, 19th.—The town of Baebaegie is in latitude 11° 34′ north, and longitude 9° 13′ east, and stands as it were in the midst of a large plain, having in sight, from the granite mount about a musket shot outside the southern gate, the hills of Nora, about ten miles east; to the south, the mountains of Surem, distant about twenty-five miles; to the west I could distinguish the tops of one or two of the hills of Aushin, in Zegzeg; to the north a plain bounded only by the horizon; to the north-east the two mounts inside the walls of Kano could just be distinguished above the horizontal line, bearing north-east by north. One hill bore north, breaking the horizontal line, twenty or twenty-two miles; the land, every where the eye turned, looked beautiful; the grain was just high enough to wave with the wind; little towns and villages were numerous; the trees full of foliage, none being left hardly but such as were fit for use, such as the micadania or butter-tree, the nutta or durow, and the tamarind: heads of fine white cattle were seen grazing on the fallow ground; horses and mares were tethered in the small spaces left between the plantations in cultivation; women, to the amount of a hundred, were thrashing out corn with large sticks, on the flat rock at the base of the mount, the wind, blowing fresh from the westward, serving them as a winnowing machine. The town was below, in the form of an oblong square, the four sides facing the four cardinal points; the head man’s house in the centre of the town, and is like one of the old keeps or castles in Scotland, near the Borders; it is also of the Moorish form, and the general one for all the governor’s houses in Houssa. A high clay tower, through which is the gate or entrance from each side, overtops a wall of clay about twenty feet high, in the form of a square; inside are huts or coozies for the women, eunuchs, domestics, and horses; the governor occupying the upper part of the tower in times of alarm and danger, and his men-slaves and armed retainers the lower. This, like all the others, is built of clay, and is three stories high, with a flat roof and battlement. In the lower story, at each side, and above the gate, are oblong holes, which serve for archers and to give light in the upper stories; the windows are like ours in England in form, four on each side, but no attention as to regularity in placing them; the windows are either shut by a mat on the side next the wind, or by a number of