Kaffirs have a great fondness for implements made of soft iron, and prefer a knife made of that material to the best blade that Sheffield can produce. They admit that for some purposes the steel blade is superior to their own, but that for ordinary work nothing can compare with the soft iron. The steel blade breaks, and is useless, while the soft iron only bends. Moreover, when they want to scoop out a hollow in a piece of wood, such as the bowl of a spoon, the inflexible steel blade would be nearly useless. But a Kaffir simply takes his soft iron knife, bends it to the requisite curve, and thus can make, at a moment’s notice, a gouge with any degree of curvature. When he has finished his work, he puts the blade on a flat stone, and beats it straight again in a few seconds. The Kaffir knife is not at all like our own, but is shaped just like the head of an assagai. In using it, he grasps the handle just as artists represent assassins holding daggers, and not as we hold knives. He always cuts away from himself, as is shown on page 73, No. 1; and, clumsy as this mode of using a knife may appear, Englishmen have often learned to appreciate it, and to employ it in preference to the ordinary European fashion. Unfit as would be the tools made by a Kaffir when employed in Europe, those made in Europe and used in Southern Africa are still less useful. Being unacquainted with this fact, both travellers and settlers are apt to spend much money in England upon articles which they afterward find to be without the least value--articles which an experienced settler would not take as a gift. As a familiar example of the difference between the tools required in various countries, the axe may be mentioned. It is well known that, of all the varieties of this tool, the American axe is the best, as it has attained its present superiority by dint of long experience on part of the makers among the vast forests of their country. Emigrants, therefore, almost invariably supply themselves with a few American axes, and in most cases they could not do better. But in Southern Africa this excellent tool is as useless as would be a razor in chipping stones. The peculiar wood of the mimosa, a tree which is used so universally in Southern Africa, is sure to notch the edge of the axe, and in a short time to render it incapable of doing its work; whereas the South African axe, which would be a clumsy and slow working tool in America, can cut down the hardest mimosa without suffering any injury.