Apollo; not a few of them have, to the European eye, that amusing prettiness which we admire in pug-pups. The mode of life in the Mrima is simple. Men rise early and repair to either the shop, the boat, or the plantation,--more commonly they waste the morning in passing from house to house “ku amkía,”--to salute neighbours. They ignore “manners”: they enter abruptly with or without the warning cry of “Hodi! Hodi!” place their spears in the corner, and without invitation squat and extend themselves upon the floor till wearied with conversation they take “French leave.” Life, to the European so real and earnest, is with them a continued scene of drumming, dancing, and drinking, of gossip, squabble, and intrigue. The favourite inebrients are tembu or cocoa toddy, and mvinyo, its distillation, pombe or millet-beer, opium, Bhang, and sometimes foreign stimulants purchased at Zanzibar. Their food is mostly ugali, the thick porridge of boiled millet or maize flour, which represents the “staff of life” in East Africa: they usually feed twice a day, in the morning and at night-fall. They employ the cocoa-nut extensively: like the Arabs of Zanzibar, they boil their rice in the thick juice of the rasped albumen kneaded with water, and they make cakes of the pulp mixed with the flour of various grains. This immoderate use of the fruit which, according to the people, is highly refrigerant, causes, it is said, rheumatic and other diseases. A respectable man seen eating a bit of raw or undressed cocoa-nut would be derided by his fellows. They chew tobacco with lime, like the Arabs, who, under the influence of Wahhabi tenets, look upon the pipe as impure, and they rarely smoke it like the Washenzi.