To-day Lagos is a picturesque, congested town of some 80,000 inhabitants, boasting many fine public buildings and official and European and native merchants’ residences, churches, wharves, a hospital, a tramway, a bacteriological institute, a marine engineering establishment, to say nothing of cold storage and electric light plant, hotels, a racecourse, and other appurtenances of advanced civilization. Like every other part of West Africa that I have seen, Lagos is full of violent contrasts. Every variety of craft—the tonnage of the place is something like 250,000 tons per annum—is to be observed in the water and every variety of dress in the busy streets, from the voluminous robes of the turbaned Mohammedan to the latest tailoring monstrosities of Western Europe. The Yoruba lady with a Bond Street hat and hobble skirt; her sister in the infinitely more graceful enfolding cloths of blue or terra-cotta, with the bandanna kerchief for head-gear; opulent resident native merchants or Government clerks in ordinary English costume; keen-featured “uneducated” traders from whose shoulders hang the African _riga_—a cosmopolitan crowd which includes Sierra Leonean, Cape Coast, and Accra men, attracted by the many prospects of labour an ever-increasing commercial and industrial activity offers to carpenters, mechanics, traders’ assistants, and the like. Here a church thronged on Sundays with African ladies and gentlemen in their finest array; here a mosque built by the local and rapidly increasing Yoruba Muslims at a cost of £5,000. Here a happy African family laughing and chattering in a tumbledown old shanty within close proximity to a “swagger” bungalow gay with brilliant creepers; there a seminary where a number of young ladies, looking supremely uncomfortable in their European frocks, supplemented by all the etceteras of Western feminine wardrobes, their short hair frizzled out into weird contortions, are learning as fast as their teachers can make them those hundred and one inutilities which widen the breach between them and their own beautiful, interesting land. A certain kind of prosperity is writ large over the place, but there is good reason to believe that economic pressure in its different forms, none more acutely felt than the ascending price of foodstuffs, is beginning to bear hardly upon the poorer classes, and the political and social atmosphere of the town is not altogether healthy.