As on the Mrima, the proportion of chiefs to subjects seems to increase in the inverse ratio of what is required. Every district in K’hutu has its P’hazi or headman, with his minister the Mwene Goha, and inferior chiefs, the Chándumé, the Muwinge, and the Mbárá. These men live chiefly upon the produce of their fields, which they sell to caravans; they are too abject and timid to insist upon the blackmail which has caused so many skirmishes in Uzaramo; and the only use that they make of their power is to tyrannise over their villages, and occasionally to organise a little kidnapping. With the aid of slavery and black magic they render their subjects’ lives as precarious as they well can: no one, especially in old age, is safe from being burnt at a day’s notice. They are civil to strangers, but wholly unable to mediate between them and the tribe. The Wak’hutu have been used as porters; but they have proved so treacherous, and so determined to desert, that no man will trust them in a land where prepayment is the first condition of an agreement. Property amongst them is insecure: a man has always a vested right in his sister’s children; and when he dies his brothers and relations carefully plunder his widow and orphans. The dirty, slovenly villages of the Wak’hutu are an index of the character of the people. Unlike the comfortable cottages of the coast, and the roomy abodes of the Wazaramo, the settlements of the Wak’hutu are composed of a few straggling hovels of the humblest description--with doors little higher than an English pigsty, and eaves so low that a man cannot enter them except on all fours. In shape they differ, some being simple cones, others like European haystacks, and others like our old straw beehives. The common hut is a circle from 12 to 25 feet in diameter; those belonging to the chiefs are sometimes of considerable size, and the first part of the erection is a cylindrical framework composed of tall stakes, or the rough trunks of young trees, interwoven with parallel and concentric rings of flexible twigs and withies, which are coated inside and outside with puddle of red or grey clay. In some a second circle of wall is built round the inner cylinder, thus forming one house within the other. The roof, subsequently added, is of sticks and wattles, and the weight rests chiefly upon a central tree. It has eaves-like projections, forming a narrow verandah, edged with horizontal bars which rest upon forked uprights. Over the sticks interwoven with the frame, thick grass or palm-fronds are thrown, and the whole is covered with a coat of thatch tied on with strips of tree bark. During the first few minutes of heavy rain, this roofing, shrunk by the parching suns, admits water enough to patch the interior with mud. The furniture of the cottages is like that of the Wazaramo; and the few square feet which compose the area are divided by screens of wattle into dark pigeon-holes, used as stores, kitchen, and sleeping-rooms. A