When an infant is born, it is, as has been already mentioned, of a light hue, and does not gain the red-black of its parents until after some little time has elapsed. The same phenomenon takes place with the negro of Western Africa. Almost as soon as the Kaffir is born the “medicine-man” is called, and discharges his functions in a manner very different from “medical men” in our own country. He does not trouble himself in the least about the mother, but devotes his whole care to the child, on whom he performs an operation something like that of vaccination, though not for the same object. He makes small incisions on various parts of the body, rubs medicine into them, and goes his way. Next day he returns, takes the unhappy infant, deepens the cuts, and puts more medicine into them. The much-suffering child is then washed, and is dried by being moved about in the smoke of a wood fire. Surviving this treatment by some singular tenacity of life, the little creature is then plentifully bedaubed with red paint, and the proud mother takes her share of the adornment. This paint is renewed as fast as it wears off, and is not discontinued until after a lapse of several months. [Illustration: CRADLE.] “Once,” writes Mr. Shooter, “when I saw this paint put on, the mother had carefully washed a chubby boy, and made him clean and bright. She then took up the fragment of an earthenware pot, which contained a red fluid, and, dipping her fingers into it, proceeded to daub her son until he became the most grotesque-looking object it was ever my fortune to behold. What remained, being too precious to waste, was transferred to her own face.” Not until all these absurd preliminaries are completed, is the child allowed to take its natural food; and it sometimes happens that when the “medicine-man” has delayed his coming, the consequences to the poor little creature have been extremely disastrous. After the lapse of a few days, the mother goes about her work as usual, carrying the child strapped on her back, and, in spite of the load, she makes little, if any, difference in the amount of her daily tasks. And, considering that all the severe work falls upon the women, it is wonderful that they should contrive to do any work at all under the circumstances. The two principal tasks of the women are, breaking up the ground with a heavy and clumsy tool, something between a pickaxe and a mattock, and grinding the daily supply of corn between two stones, and either of these tasks would prove quite enough for any ordinary laborer, though the poor woman has to perform both, and plenty of minor tasks besides. That they should have to do all this work, while laboring under the incumbrance of a heavy and growing child hung on the back, does really seem very hard upon the women. But they, having never known any other state of things, accept their laborious married life as a matter of course.