During this stay at Musculo’s house, I observed the tattooing process by which the Shoan ladies disfigure their faces with large artificial eyebrows of a black colour; for nearly the whole day was occupied by Eichess ornamenting in this manner, the broadly round face of her fat slave-girl, Mahriam. It appeared to be no joke, although, if a ridiculous absurdity could have suspended my predisposition to the fever paroxysm, it would have been this beautifying operation. The whole year previously, every depilatory means by which to eradicate the natural hairs of the eyebrows had been employed, and the pertinacious industry with which this had been done, I noticed on my previous visit had occasioned an expression of vacuity that was not at all wanted in the ever-smiling expanse of countenance which Mahriam displayed over a bust, breast, and body, so large and fat, that darkened the house immediately if she stood a moment in the wide door-way. One half of the right eye-brow had been done two or three days previously, a very promising dry scab of charcoal and the natural secretion consequent upon a sore had formed, and which was looked at by Eichess with all the interest that a mother may be supposed to examine the progress of the virus influence upon her recently vaccinated child. In a word, it was pronounced to be promising very well, and the instruments and dye were then produced to finish the business. Eichess sat upon a boss of straw, and Mahriam knelt down before her, whilst Walderheros, to encourage the latter to bear the pain with fortitude, told her to be sure and recollect she was a _man_. A bundle of long white thorns, which I recognised as belonging to the commonest kind of mimosa, were now taken from a rag in which they were folded, and one being selected, Eichess commenced with it a dotting kind of puncturing in the skin, along a semicircular line, previously marked with a piece of charcoal around the frontal edge of the orbit, and which, besides including the bald part of the original eyebrow, was prolonged considerably towards the lower part of the temple, and also extended to the middle of the space between the eyes, where it met the similar delineation coming from the other side. Blood soon flowed freely, and I could scarcely have imagined it possible that such a punishment could be sustained for the attainment of so unnatural an ornament. Custom must constitute the principal part of original sin, or such barbarous attempts as these to improve upon nature would not be persisted in from one generation to another. The ladies of antiquity, I recollect learning when I was a student, employed a black mineral, _stibium_, supposed to be _plumbago_, or black lead; for the purpose, says Celsus, of making them black browed, and this fashion, with many others, appears to have been early introduced in to Abyssinia, either by the Greeks or Romans, and has been continued in that country to the present day. The manner