And now a faint amber flush appears in the eastern sky. It is the signal for many sounds. A hum of many human bees, the crowing of countless roosters, the barking of lean and yellow “pye” dogs, the braying of the donkey and the neigh of his nobler relative, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle. The scent of burning wood assails the nostrils with redolent perfume. The white tick-birds, which have passed the night close-packed on the fronds of the tall fan-palms, rustle their feathers and prepare, in company with their scraggy-necked scavenging colleagues the vultures, for the useful if unedifying business of the day. Nigerian life begins, and what a busy intensive life it is! From sunrise to sunset, save for a couple of hours in the heat of the day, every one appears to have his hands full. Soon all will be at work. The men driving the animals to pasture, or hoeing in the fields, or busy at the forge, or dye-pit or loom; or making ready to sally forth to the nearest market with the products of the local industry. The women cooking the breakfast, or picking or spinning cotton, or attending to the younger children, or pounding corn in large and solid wooden mortars, pulping the grain with pestles—long staves, clubbed at either end—grasped now in one hand, now in the other, the whole body swinging with the stroke as it descends, and, perhaps, a baby at the back, swinging with it; or separating on flat slabs of stone the seed from the cotton lint picked the previous day. This is a people of agriculturists, for among them agriculture is at once life’s necessity and its most important occupation. The sowing and reaping, and the intermediate seasons bring with them their several tasks. The ground must be cleared and hoed, and the sowing of the staple crops concluded before the early rains in May, which will cover the land with a sheet of tender green shoots of guinea-corn, maize, and millet, and, more rarely, wheat. When these crops have ripened, the heads of the grain will be cut off, the bulk of them either marketed or stored—spread out upon the thatch-roofed houses to dry, sometimes piled up in a huge circle upon a cleared, dry space—in granaries of clay or thatch, according to the local idea; others set aside for next year’s seeds. The stalks, ten to fifteen feet in height, will be carefully gathered and stacked for fencing purposes. Nothing that nature provides or man produces is wasted in this country. Nature is, in general, kind. It has blessed man with a generally fertile and rapidly recuperative soil, provided also that in the more barren, mountainous regions, where ordinary processes would be insufficient, millions of earth-worms shall annually fling their casts of virgin sub-soil upon the sun-baked surface. And man himself, in perennial contact with Nature, has learned to read and retain many of her secrets which his civilized brother has forgotten. One tree grows gourds with neck and all complete, which need