The common enceinte formed by the houses is often divided into various courts, intended for different families, by the walls of the tenements, or by stout screens, and connected by long wynds and dark alleys of palisade-work. The largest and cleanest square usually belongs to the headman. In these spaces cattle are milked and penned; the ground is covered with a thick coat of the animals’ earths, dust in the hot weather and deep viscid mud during the rains: the impurity must be an efficacious fomite of cutaneous and pectoral disease. The villagers are fond of planting in the central courts trees, under whose grateful shade the loom is plied, the children play, the men smoke, and the women work. Here, also, stands the little Mzimu, or Fetiss-hut, to receive the oblations of the pious. Places are partitioned off from the public ground, near the houses, by horizontal trunks of trees, resting on forks, forming pens to keep the calves from the cows at night. In some villages huge bolsters of surplus grain, neatly packed in bark and corded round, are raised on tall poles near the interior doors of the tenements. Often, too, the insides of the settlements boast of pigeon-houses, which in this country are made to resemble, in miniature, those of the people. In Unyamwezi the centre is sometimes occupied by the Iwanza, or village “public-house,” which will be described in a future chapter. In some regions, as in Ugogo, these lodgings become peculiarly offensive if not burnt after the first year. The tramping of the owners upon the roof shakes mud and soot from the ceiling, and the rains wash down masses of earthwork heavy enough to do injury. The interior is a menagerie of hens, pigeons, and rats, of peculiar impudence. Scorpions and earwigs fall from their nests in the warm or shady rafters. The former, locally termed “Nge,” is a small yellow variety, and though it stings spitefully the pain seldom lasts through the day; as many as three have dropped upon my couch in the course of the week. In Ugogo there is a green scorpion from four to five inches long, which inflicts a torturing wound. According to the Arabs the scorpion in Eastern Africa dies after inflicting five consecutive stings, and commits suicide if a bit of stick be applied to the middle of its back. The earwig is common in all damp places, and it haunts the huts on account of the shade. The insect apparently casts its coat before the rainy season, and the Africans ignore the superstition which in most European countries has given origin to its trivial name. A small xylophagus with a large black head rains a yellow dust like pollen from the riddled woodwork; house-crickets chirp from evening to dawn; cockroaches are plentiful as in an Indian steamer; and a solitary mason-wasp, the “Kumbharni,” or “potter’s wife” of western India--a large hymenopter of several varieties, tender-green, or black and yellow, or dark metallic