The men will sometimes help in the farms when trees have to be felled, but otherwise the women perform the farm work; and as the ground does not need much scratching to produce a crop, the hoeing and weeding afford them healthy employment, sufficient to keep them so far out of mischief. We have seen towns in the neighbourhood of Stanley Pool where the women do no farm work, living on the proceeds of their husband’s ivory trade; they gossip, smoke, sleep, and cook, or spend an hour or two in arranging the coiffure of their lord or of a companion. Laziness is not good for any folk, and where there is so little housework the gardening is not too severe a tax on the women. Towards evening they return, bringing some cabbage or cassava leaves, or something to make up some little relish, and proceed to cook the evening meal. The men have their own departments of work: they are great traders. The Congo week consists of four days; Nkandu, Konzo, Nhenge, Nsona, and every four or eight days they hold their markets. As they have many markets within a moderate distance, and occurring on different days of the week, there is generally a market to attend on each day, if any one is so disposed. The marketplaces are in open country, generally on a hill-top, away from towns. These precautions prevent surprises. On the appointed day large numbers of men, women, and children are to be met carrying their goods. There is cassava in various forms, dried, in puddings, or as meal; plantain, ground-nuts, and other food-stuffs; pigs, goats, sheep, fowls and fish; dried caterpillars on skewers; dried meat; wares from Europe; cloth, beads, knives, guns, brass wire, salt, gunpowder. Drink in abundance, palm wine, native beer, sometimes gin and rum. Native produce, such as palm oil, ground-nuts, sesamum, india-rubber, crates of fowls, bundles of native cloth, meal sieves, baskets, hoes, etc. Stringent laws are made to protect these markets. No one is allowed to come armed, no one may catch a debtor on market-day, no one may use a knife against another in a passion. The penalty for all these offences is death, and many muzzles of buried guns stick up in the market places to warn other rowdies against a like fate. Between the coast and Stanley Pool beads are the currency; above the Pool brass rods take their place. A man wishing to sell salt and to buy india-rubber, first sells his salt for beads, and with the beads buys the rubber. Large profits can be made on these markets, and many natives spend the greater part of their time travelling from one to another for the purpose of trade.