Small children’s heads are shaved, from time to time, in the interests of cleanliness, by their mothers; older boys and girls do it for each other. I saw a woman performing this service for her little girl who was squatting on the ground before her; she first greased the hair with some mixture which she took out of a small earthen pot, and which had the consistency of soft soap, and then scraped from the nape of the neck forward and upward, with a little spatula-shaped iron razor, held firmly in the right hand. Having finished the hair, she went on to shave the eyebrows, but I do not think this is always done. The strings of beads which the very little girls wear round their waists disappear from view when they grow older and wear a cloth; but they are kept on all the same, and added to from time to time, till, when they are grown up, they may have several thick rolls. These, of course, are not worn for ornament, but it is considered the safest and handiest way of storing property, and a woman thus carries her private fortune about with her. Children and young people often stick flowers in their hair, or into the perforation of the ear, and girls at Likoma weave wreaths or crowns out of the _namteke_ blossoms, a small kind of sunflower. As soon as children are able to eat solid food, they fare much the same as their elders, though there are two or three kinds of sweet, thick gruel, besides that already mentioned, which are made specially for the younger ones, and also sometimes for sick people. It is sweetened—not with sugar, but with malt (that is, sprouting maize or millet), or the juice of a kind of millet, which is almost as sweet as sugar-cane. The stalks of this _msale_—and also sugar-cane, where that is to be had—are constantly being chewed, both by children and grown-up people. The results are visible on every native path as little bundles of tousled white fibrous matter—and the new comer is apt to wonder what they are. There is a game which mothers sometimes play with children supposed to be too old for special infant diet; they tickle the child’s back with a stalk of grass, and, if he starts, accuse him of having ‘eaten the baby’s gruel’—which would be more attractive than the ordinary _nsima_.