It remains still to notice some examples of the various handicrafts which are practised by this people. Compared with other nations, the Bongo are remarkable for the attention they give to basket-work. They make (very much after the fashion of a coffee-bag) a strainer to filter and clarify their “legyee,” which is a drink something like ale fermented from sorghum. Baskets are roughly yet substantially made by twining together the stems of the bamboo. As their first efforts in this line, the natives are accustomed to make the circular envelopes in which they pack their corn for exportation. They take the coriaceous leaves of the Combreta and Terminaliæ, and by inserting the petiole of one leaf into the laminæ of two others, they form strips of leaves which in a few minutes are made into a kind of basket, equally strong and flexible, which answers its purpose admirably. Woven matting is very rarely found in use. The walls of every hut are made of basket-work, as are the beehives, which are more often than not under the shadow of some adjacent butter-tree. Generally these hives are long cylinders, which midway have an opening about six inches square. The yield of honey, wild or half-wild, is very large, and of fine quality: the bees belong to the European species. The aroma of the Gardenia flowers is retained to a very palpable degree, but wherever the Candelabra-euphorbia happens to be abundant, the honey partakes of the drastic properties of its poisonous milk, and has been the cause of the natives being reproached with the intention of poisoning the Nubians. [Sidenote: BONGO FISHING.] In consequence of the people being so much engrossed at certain periods of the year by their hunting and fishing, the manufacture of fish-nets, creels, and snares, makes an important item in their industrial pursuits. For the most part all the twist, the bird-snares, and the fishing-lines are made from the fibres of bast, which are so plentiful in the cultivated Crotalaria and the Hibiscus. For inferior purposes the common lime-like bast of the _Grewia mollis_ is made to suffice. The _Sanseviera guineensis_ is not less abundant, but the bast which it yields, although very fine, is not very enduring. It is generally very black through having been left to lie upon the dark soil of the marshes, and is only used for making a kind of kilt like a horse’s tail, which the women wear behind from a girdle about their waist. Cotton-shrubs are planted only by the Dinka, who make their fishing-lines of the material which is thus provided.