The horses are generally small, I should say, from 13½ hands to 15 hands. One of 17 hands towers over nearly all it will pass in the course of a month. The animals have not the stamina of the British horse and are slower. They are entire. An experiment was made to have 17 geldings in the mounted infantry, but the animals proved dull and spiritless and were discarded as useless. [Illustration: THE MAGISTRATE’S COURT IN THE MARKET. His Worship is on the steps. (See page 107.)] [Illustration: A DETACHMENT OF THE EMIR’S POLICE. (See page 68.)] Horses are unshod and mercifully their tails are not cut short, for flies around Kano are a perpetual torment to man and beast. The rest-house (!) in which I was sentenced to live, but to which I did not go, would have been a torture in that respect. It stood in a field near where herds of cattle passed accompanied by swarms of winged insects. An ideal place, truly, to put anybody who was writing hours daily. Knowing what I now do of Kano ways, it is just what might have been looked for from one quarter. The bit used by natives is similar to that seen in North Africa and other Arab towns. The pace of the horse is checked by the rein bearing on the bit, as a person would press a lever, the action causing the bit to press on the palate, and as the iron bar has two prongs which rise as the rein is tightened, the result is extremely painful. At times blood will trickle from the animals’ mouths, the palate having been pierced by the prongs on the bit bar. It is right to say that this bleeding will occasionally be caused by champing and not by misuse. Horses ridden by natives are, as a rule, never thoroughly groomed. They are given a rub down about once a week. I have heard that once a year represents a nearer estimate on the period when the operation is performed. Of course, horses belonging to Englishmen have the pattern bit in use at home, and the doki boy—as the groom is styled, doki being horse in Hausa language—is soon initiated into the use of curry-comb and brush. The weekly cost of having a horse is small: 3s. for guinea corn and 3s. 6d. the doki boy’s wages. The pain from the native bit is nothing to the unutterable suffering endured by camels and donkeys engaged in bringing loads to Kano City and taking them thence to places around. It is too terrible for words to express adequately one’s sense of shame and anger that such a state of things should exist. I am given to understand that the folks at the Residency are so frightfully busy, but I do wish the Resident would find a few minutes to make representations to the Emir. I am certain an immediate improvement could be brought about and probably a permanently better condition effected in the course of a few months.