I cannot understand the statement sometimes made, that native children do not know how to play, are without toys and games, and have rather a melancholy time of it altogether. The traveller who speaks of their portentous and unnatural solemnity has, of course, only observed them under the inspiring influence of his own immediate neighbourhood. It is curious to contrast the pathetic appeals on this score to the compassion of English children which one sometimes reads with the experience of the missionaries at Magomero. ‘Indeed it was a question with us at one time what it was we could teach these children of ours in the way of amusement. At last, Scudamore and Waller thought to surprise them with a kite. The kite was made, the children assembled to see it ascend, but it was lop-sided and heavy, would not go up, went down, and the children made merry thereat. Said Waller, “You have never seen anything like this before, have you?” Said a little urchin in reply, “Oh yes! we have, though. We have seen them, but ours were different to yours. Ours went up, yours go down.”’ These children had been hunted away from their homes, some of them had lost their parents, they had all suffered more or less from hunger and some of them from illness, so that a certain amount of depression would have been excusable; but the spirit in which they entered into the kindly meant effort to amuse them is thoroughly characteristic. But for that casual question, their instructors would never have learned that they knew how to make kites which would go up. Miss Woodward tells me that she has seen the Likoma children playing with kites, but I have never seen one myself, and cannot describe their exact construction. There are two kinds of tops, the wooden one (_nguli_), which is kept up by beating, like our whipping-top, with a lash of three strands of bark tied to a bit of stick. The other, the _nsikwa_, is made of a round piece of gourd-shell, with a spindle of cane through the middle of it. ‘The game is played by two parties sitting opposite to each other, with a bare space of hard ground between them, and spinning the tops across the empty space with as much force as a twirl between the finger and thumb is capable of, at little pieces of maize-cob set up before their adversaries.’ Any number can play, one top and one piece of maize-cob being allowed to each, and the game is to knock over all the pieces on the opposite side before those on one’s own side are overthrown. The player whose piece is knocked over catches his adversary’s top and fires it back at him.