Fresh food retailed in Kano City is at low figures, though prices have greatly advanced recently. A chicken, furnishing a meal sufficient for two persons, is bought for 5d.; a guinea-fowl, larger than the chicken, costs 3d. or 4d. A duck is to be had at a corresponding figure. Eggs are purchased at 10 a penny. Sweet potatoes—long, thin, circular—are not disposed of by weight, but are retailed at sight; and fivepennyworth lasts four meals. Onions—larger than turnips, some of them scaling 1½ lbs.—minus the strong flavour of the English variety—cost 4 a penny. By going two or three miles to the farms where they are grown, sufficient to fill an apple-barrel can be secured for 6d. A leg of mutton—flesh that is dearer than beef—sells at 5d., and is more than enough for four diners. Man does not live by meat alone, and anybody coming here should bear in mind that he is entering a new country, from the European standpoint, where, although foodstuffs are raised, the population has quite a different standard of feeding from his; where railway communication has been merely a matter of months; that things which he probably considers necessary for his existence are just beginning to be sold and that they are of less importance and value to the firms selling them than other articles, which therefore are naturally given preference; and, further, that the articles referred to and others of the same character are occasionally sold out at the great port of Lagos. I had trouble there to buy two tins of sugar. Estimate, then, the position in Kano, distance of a week by railway. With the exception of the Lagos Stores, all the establishments at Kano are in temporary buildings. The Niger Company has houses of mud and straw and one of corrugated iron. The Tin Areas Company has corrugated iron and also mud houses; whilst the French Company and the Syrian trader have confined themselves to the latter material. Each store stands in a compound. A section is 300 feet long by 100 feet wide. The Niger Company has four sections, the French Company four, the Tin Areas two, Lagos Stores two, the Syrian one. The buildings, of course, only cover a small portion of the ground occupied.