The task of the fields is committed to the women and young girls, the men thinking such duties beneath them. In order to keep off the birds from the newly sprouted corn blades, or from the just ripening grain, a very ingenious device is employed. A great number of tall, slender posts are stuck at intervals all over the piece of land, and strings made of bark are led from pole to pole, all the ends being brought to the top of the watch-tower, where they are firmly tied. As soon as a flock of birds alight on the field, the girl in charge of the tower pulls the strings violently, which sets them all vibrating up and down, and so the birds are frightened, and fly away to another spot. A system almost identical with this is employed both in the Chinese and Japanese empires, and the complicated arrangement of poles and strings, and the central watch-tower, is a favorite subject for illustration in the rude but graphic prints which both nations produce with such fertility. The enemies of the cornfield are innumerable. There are, in the first place, hosts of winged foes, little birds and insects, which cannot be prohibited from entering, and can only be driven away when they have entered. Then there are certain members of the monkey tribes, notably the baboons, or chacmas, which care very little more for a fence than do the birds, and which, if they find climbing the fence too troublesome, can generally insinuate themselves through its interstices. This cunning and active animal is at times too clever even for the Kaffir, and will succeed in stealing unobserved into his garden, and carrying off the choicest of the crops. Whatever a man will eat a chacma will eat, and the creature knows as well as the man when the crops are in the best order. Whether the garden contain maize, millet, pumpkins, sweet reed, or fruits, the chacma is sure to select the best; and even when the animals are detected, and chased out of the garden, it is very annoying to the proprietor to see them go off with a quantity of spoil, besides the amount which they have eaten. The ordinary food of the chacma is a plant called Babiana, from the use which the baboons make of it. It is a subterranean root, which has the property of being always full of watery juice in the dryest weather, so that it is of incalculable value to travellers who have not a large supply of water with them, or who find that the regular fountains are dried up. Many Kaffirs keep tame chacmas which they have captured when very young, and which have scarcely seen any of their kind. These animals are very useful to the Kaffirs, for, if they come upon a plant or a fruit which they do not know, they offer it to the baboon; and if he eats it, they know that it is suitable for human consumption.