Although undoubtedly belonging to one and the same parent stock, as a race the Batoro are in features superior to the Baganda, but physically inferior owing to the different conditions under which their lives have been lived. Women, both high and low, until within recent years, were practically the slaves of the Baganda households, and even now are expected to do the cultivating and cooking of the food. Before the sun has risen the Baganda women start on their digging in their banana plantations or potato fields. This has developed their muscles and at the same time had a healthy effect on the mind, for no one can handle nature without consciously or unconsciously being influenced by it for good. The Batoro women, on the other hand, have been merely the chattels of the home. The upper classes scorned menial work and left it to their dependents and peasant folk. The middle class did no more than was absolutely essential, which generally resolved itself into cooking the one meal for the day. Their homes offered no occupation for them. The rude grass huts possessed no furnishing, for their wants were of the simplest. Bark cloth stripped off the wild fig tree and beaten out into a soft texture, or animals skins, provided them with clothing by day and covering at night. Their water vessels consisted of the hollowed out gourds that grow round their huts. One cooking pot sufficed for the household. A plaited grass mat took the place of mattress over a bed of reeds strung across a wooden framework and built in along the side of the hut. Grass covered the floor of every house—seldom changed and never aired. Soot and cobwebs hung in festoons round the inside, as there are no chimneys in the huts to carry away the smoke from the open fire in the centre of the floor. In recent years the upper class women have discarded the bark-cloth as apparel for white calico and coloured prints. When these garments show signs of wear the general custom is neither to wash nor change them for fear of hastening their end, but clean draperies are thrown over them when the wearer appears in public.