but to be plucked, emptied and dried to make first-rate water-bottles. A vigorous ground creeper yields enormous pumpkin-shaped fruit whose contents afford a succulent potage, while its thick shell scraped and dried furnishes plates, bowls, pots, and dishes of every size, and put to a hundred uses: ornaments, too, when man has grafted his art upon its surface with dyes and carved patterns. A bush yields a substantial pod which when ready to burst and scatter its seeds is found to contain a fibrous substance which resembles—and may be identical with, I am not botanist enough to tell—the loofah of commerce, and is put to the same uses. From the seeds of the beautiful locust-bean tree (_dorowa_), whose gorgeous crimson blooms form so notable a feature of the scenery in the flowering season, soup is made, while the casing of the bean affords a singularly enduring varnish. The fruit of the invaluable _Kadenia_ or shea tree is used for food, for oil, and medicinally. The bees receive particular attention for their honey and their wax, the latter utilized in sundry ways from ornamenting Korans down to the manufacture of candles. As many as a dozen oblong, mud-lined, wicker hives closed at one end, the other having a small aperture, may sometimes be seen in a single tree. Before harvest time has dawned and with the harvesting, the secondary crops come in for attention. Cassava and cotton, indigo and sugar-cane, sweet potatoes and tobacco, onions and ground-nuts, beans and pepper, yams and rice, according to the locality and suitability of the soil. The farmers of a moist district will concentrate on the sugar-cane—its silvery, tufted, feathery crowns waving in the breeze are always a delight: of a dry, on ground-nuts: those enjoying a rich loam on cotton, and so on. While the staple crops represent the imperious necessity of life—food, the profits from the secondary crops are expended in the purchase of clothing, salt and tools, the payment of taxes, the entertainment of friends and chance acquaintances (a generous hospitality characterizes this patriarchal society), and the purchase of luxuries, kolas, tobacco, ornaments for wives and children. It is a revelation to see the cotton-fields, the plants in raised rows three feet apart, the land having in many cases been precedently enriched by a catch-crop of beans, whose withering stems (where not removed for fodder, or hoed in as manure) are observable between the healthy shrubs, often four or five feet in height, thickly covered with yellow flowers or snowy bolls of white, bursting from the split pod. The fields themselves are protected from incursions of sheep and goats by tall neat fencing of guinea-corn stalks, or reeds, kept in place by native rope of uncommon strength. Many cassava fields, the root of this plant furnishing an invaluable diet, being indeed, one of the staples of the more southerly regions, are similarly fenced. Equally astonishing are the irrigated farms which you