This may be divided, roughly, into offensive and defensive. You enter the little courtyard and see growing in the space between the huts, a cherished bush of cayenne peppers, to which is tied a protective apparatus consisting of a small wooden hoop with a goat’s or ram’s horn filled with heaven knows what messes, fastened into it. Or a string is hung at the door of a house, which is supposed to turn into a snake if any one enters to steal. Or a bamboo is set up close to the garden, with a horn on the top of it; or a string is run round the crops, or you may see ashes laid beside the path which passes by them; or, again, the medicine may be buried. Snail-shells and bundles of leaves may be used in this way. Those who attempt to steal in spite of these contrivances will either die on the spot or be taken ill afterwards. The word _winda_, which means to protect a garden (or anything else) in this way, is also used of women letting their hair grow while their husbands are on a journey, lest any ill should befall the travellers. They are also supposed (among the Yaos at any rate) to refrain from washing their faces or anointing their heads till the absent ones return. It would be impossible to enumerate all the different varieties of ‘medicine.’ I believe there is some preventive of every ill likely to befall mankind, and those who understand such things can do a profitable business. The Shiré people venture recklessly into the water if they are provided with ‘crocodile medicine’; and there are medicines against lions, leopards, and, I suppose, every variety of dangerous wild beast, not to mention the ‘gun medicine,’ which enables the hunter to shoot straight, and which, perhaps, ought to be classed in the ‘offensive’ category, but that it is free from sinister associations. Most European sportsmen, if at all successful, have been importuned for this, and it used to be firmly believed that the late Mr. Monteith Fotheringham, who was a very good shot, wore a belt charged with exceedingly powerful ‘medicines’ next his skin. There are also ‘medicines’ to make a man bullet-proof, like Chibisa, the Nyanja chief, who was brought down at last by a sand-bullet, as Dundee was with a silver one at Killiecrankie. Some natives once assured me that Chikumbu, a Yao chief, who at one time gave the Administration some trouble, was invulnerable by shot or steel; the only thing that could kill him—since he had not been fortified against it by the proper medicine—was a sharp splinter of bamboo. This reminds one of Balder and the mistletoe. The East African Wadoe have a legend about a magician who could be killed by one thing only—the stalk of a gourd. But as the gourd-stalk was ‘a forbidden thing’ to him, this suggests the subject of _miiko_ or tabu-prohibitions, which we must take up presently.