Everything is done in a thorough, systematic way, for which purpose a laboratory and an operating room are provided. One of the patients came from Forcados. When there he was ill. Not sufficiently so to be invalided home but too low in health to remain. So he had been sent the 337 miles up the Niger to Lokoja Hospital to be nursed and was about to be returned “as good as new.” The staff consists of a senior medical officer, a medical officer, four nurses, and two Sergeants of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who are storekeeper and dispenser. The hospital for natives is several hundred yards away. A brick building 90 feet long, it holds 35 beds, of which 2 (in a separate room) are for women, though there are seldom in-patients of that sex. The principal complaints which bring men towards the end of the year are sciatica, lumbago, and bronchitis. Malaria is always represented, but the most common case is tape-worm, due to dirty food. The operating-room and dispensary are in buildings apart from the wards. The two white doctors have as assistants here—all natives—a wardmaster and three dressers, and also as dressers one Corporal and three orderlies of the Northern Nigeria Regiment. In no part of Northern Nigeria is the native population, in health or in sickness, more solicitously watched than in Lokoja. There are two further features of life in Lokoja which should not be ignored. One is the military, the other the missionary. The former is dealt with in Chapter XXXIII; as to the latter, I make no pretence about looking upon that aspect of European influence, as a rule, with disfavour. In one case I have criticised with perhaps extreme severity. All the same, I hope I have the spirit of fairness, and it is only bare fairness to say what is done by the Church Missionary Society in Lokoja. The compound in which the house stands presents the gladsome sight of trees bearing oranges, guava, mangoes and sweet cassava. The only other orange tree in any part of the town is at the local headquarters of the Public Works Department. Apart from bananas, native cultivation of fruit in those parts of Nigeria through which I have passed is practically nil. But wherever there is a branch of the Church Missionary Society there you will see fruit trees. That is due to the late Bishop Crowther, in whose day all missionaries in Nigeria were, like himself, blacks. He insisted on every station showing at least one fruit tree flourishing.