Some of the people on Mlanje ornament the plastering of their houses with figures of animals in black, white, and red, but I have not seen any of these. A hut I saw at Ntumbi had the walls plaited in a neat sort of basket-pattern and daubed inside with black mud in a way that suggested an attempt at ornamentation; one of the circular rafters, too, was neatly decorated with small white feathers, stuck on at regular intervals. The smoke is left to find its way out through the thatch; consequently the inside of the roof, with the _nsanja_ and everything on it, is black and shiny, and any article which has come out of a native hut may be known at once by a peculiar smell, compounded of wood-smoke and castor-oil. Square houses, which are often built not only by people at missions but by Yaos who brought the notion from the coast, are much less typical, and from a practical point of view less satisfactory; they are always stuffy and frowsy, in a way the round huts are not. The latter seem to ventilate fairly well through the thatch, and the smoke, which might be expected to make the atmosphere quite impossible, is avoided if you do as the natives do and sit on the floor. The square house, too, has corners in which rubbish can accumulate, and though it has something by way of windows, they neither admit air enough to sweeten, nor light enough to see, the interior. Besides, a new and well-made hut has an artistic completeness of its own, and pleases the eye, as a lop-sided, straggling _nyumba ya gome_ can never do. Each wife has her own hut, where her children sleep with her—the boys till they are old enough to go to the _gowero_, or dormitory, the girls till they leave for homes of their own. The father of the family has sometimes his own separate hut, sometimes he lives in the others, turn about, or in the head-wife’s house (_kuka_), which is the proper centre of the home. Frequently, however, his mother is the real head of the family and occupies the _kuka_, though she may also have a house of her own apart. In a large village, the _bwalo_ or ‘forum’ may be the space round which all the huts are grouped; in other cases it is a place by itself outside all the enclosures. The sacred fig-tree which marks it is often apparently a very old one; so that, no doubt, the site is a more or less permanent one, round which the shifting kraals group themselves in various rearrangements. I have a sketch of the great fig-tree at Chona’s which stood between the village and the maize-gardens. Various articles were hanging on this tree—gourd-dippers and a mouse-trap—but whether as votive offerings, or as a mere matter of convenience, I never made out.