coloured and plaited lines of grass strung over a small rod, which is hung across the top of the window; the ends falling down, admit sufficient air and light, and keep out flies. This plan is also used for the doors of inner apartments in the lower houses, and requires no opening or shutting. The rooms in the town are supported by pillars formed by lashing long poles together until sufficiently strong, and, when they are up, plastering them thickly over in all parts with clay, and then a coating of cow-dung, to prevent the white ants and other insects eating away the wood; the great beams are formed in the same manner. The floors of the upper rooms are first laid with rafters of stout poles, then short diagonal pieces are laid over as close as they can be laid, then a coating of clay and small gravel is laid six or eight inches thick. The walls are made, first by mixing clay well up with a little chopped grass or cow-dung, and making it up in lumps of two handfuls, and letting it dry in the sun; when dry, they build with them as our masons would do with rough stones, laying a thick layer of well-wrought soft clay between each layer of hardened lumps, and a good thick coat outside: their hand is the only trowel; and, without plumb-line or level, they manage to make pretty fair walls and buildings, taking these things into consideration. The walls outside, before the commencement of every rainy season, get a fresh plastering, the tops are repaired, and parts that may be washed down are built up. The water is conveyed from the tops of the houses, clear of the walls, by long, baked, clay funnels, like what are used on the tops of smoky chimneys in England, and look like great guns mounted on the tops of the walls. The other houses of the town are like almost all others outside the capital towns, a number of circular huts within a high, square, clay wall; frequently a single room, with a flat roof, used by the master of the house as a safe repository for his goods. Every house has two or three date trees within this wall or enclosure, which bear fruit twice a year, like those of Kashna and Kano; once before or at the commencement of the rains, the other after the rains a month or forty days. They use two pieces of flat board or gourd, one fixed, the other moveable, to which is attached a line for the purpose of clapping one against the other to frighten the vampire-bat and a kind of jay which lodge on the trees and destroy a great quantity of fruit. The ibis, stork, crane, adjutant-crane, and several other birds, build their nests in the shady trees of the town. A market is held daily, which is well attended: grain, oxen, sheep, and all the necessaries of life, abound. A tame ostrich is kept in the market-place to avert the evil eye—a Bornou and eastern custom. There are several places of prayer in the town, but one principal mosque or jama, as they call them, stands on the right of the governor’s house, forming one side