This is the same kind of mill that was used by the ancient Egyptians, and is represented in the excellent work upon those people, recently written by Sir G. Wilkinson, although he describes it as being used for fulling clothes, having mistaken, I suppose, the flour represented as falling into the cup-like recipient for a stream of water. I observe, also, in another plate in the same work, a representation of this mill, but without any allusion to its real purposes. Moses, in the fifth verse of the eleventh chapter of Exodus, describes exactly the character of the occupation, and the instrument, where he speaks “of the maid-servant that is behind the mill,” for women are only employed on this duty, and they always stand in the rear, leaning forward over their work. Very few houses, those only of the poorest people, have but one mill; generally two or more stand side by side in a row, and the number is always mentioned when the idea is wished to be conveyed of the large dependent retinue that the master of the house feeds. A few large jars containing water, or ale, ranged along one side of the house, and a shield hung from the projecting end of one of the sticks that formed the front, were the only articles that occupied prominent positions as furniture in my residence. Three or four “maceroitsh,” or earthenware pots for cooking, generally lay upset in the white wood ashes contained in the large circular hearth that occupied a portion of the floor opposite to the mills; and some of the necessary but small instruments for clearing or spinning cotton were placed when not being used upon a skin bag, in which a quantity of that useful material was contained. I was very much struck with the extreme contrasts that could be drawn between the inhabitants of Farree and the Dankalli Bedouins. The large and portly forms of the former, their apparent love of quiet, the affection they evinced for their children, and that of the children for their parents, were all points characteristic of these great differences. The physiognomy of the two people exhibited equally varying features, and as the men of Farree are a good type of the real Amhara population, I shall endeavour to give an idea of the form of the countenance and the head peculiar to this family of man, by a description drawn from my first observations in that town, where the people have less admixture of Galla blood, than the inhabitants of the table land of Shoa above and beyond them. This will be preceded, however, by some necessary, and, I believe, novel information respecting the origin of the Amhara, which I became acquainted with during my residence in Shoa, and which has been singularly confirmed by a comparison of the reports and prejudices I noted down while in that country, with recorded circumstances of the earlier history of Egypt, and of other powerful empires that once existed along the course of the Nile.