He dresses with studied neglect. Sundays and week-days I have seen him in the same suit of clothes, which are not even of the style generally worn here in the bush country. They are made of tweed and are faded to the verge of shabbiness. The ends of the coat sleeves are usually covered by the turned-up cuffs of his shirt. Instead of riding boots, he wears low-cut shoes, like dancing pumps—of course, of dull leather. A first-rate horseman, he is never seen mounted; he goes hither and thither in a pair-horse buggy, the only horse-drawn vehicle in or about Kano. Colonials in hot climates have their hair cut close, but his would almost do for a Bohemian actor, musician, or artist. He is the only man I have seen for hundreds of miles who wears a beard that is more than stubble. Yet no one would mistake him for anything but what he is, a gentleman—gentleman from boyhood. Thinking of him, it strikes one as childish to painfully labour the point that the managers of the stores are merely “traders,” as distinct and distant from the very superior persons who are not. Technically correct, the term trader is understood in these parts to apply to natives who sit in open places or who are peddlers. [Illustration: CAPT. JOHN J. BROCKLEBANK, D.S.O. (See page 81.)] [Illustration: THE PREMISES OF THE LONDON AND KANO TRADING COMPANY AT KANO. (See page 80.)] Captain Brocklebank will occasionally say something stronger than a big D but always with the slight drawl which marks his intonation, never raising his voice, and with the smile which shows he is not angry. I have never seen him look so serious and solemn as he did when I was taking his photograph. He speaks Hausa colloquially and will frequently make the natives laugh by his waggisms in that tongue. I have heard him switch off his conversation with an Arab merchant to discuss matters with a French officer who could talk only in his own language. He would probably strike you as being languid and indifferent, but no Arab merchant is more alert, mentally, to the turns in a business transaction, and I happen to know that there are few, if any, individuals who look further ahead in a commercial survey. He appears to take things easily, and never hustles; but no day’s work ever overlaps another. A man who in England is spick and span, keeps his high-power motor and dwells in a large town house and a country mansion, at Kano his domicile is a more or less dilapidated mud dwelling where white ants cause pieces from what must be called the ceiling to drop continually on the mosquito curtains over the camp-bed. The combined sitting and dining-room is, I warrant, not nearly as comfortable as the stable for his hunters in England. The “wine cellar” is a shelf in the mud wall furnished with one decanter and three other bottles. The wines are for his friends. He does not take any.