_4th._--A fine morning, and not very cold. No patients, everybody apparently in health. My old friend Berka, the liberated slave, is now occupied in turning or digging, or hoeing up a whole garden of good size, about two days and a half's labour, for which he will receive one Tunisian piastre! (Seven pence English money.) This is free labour. I am sure the slave labour, the principal here, cannot be cheaper. The implements of agriculture are few and simple in The Desert. Friend Berka had but a small hoe, which is well described by Caillié, who saw it used near Jinnee, and indeed it seems to be used throughout Central Africa. This hoe is about a foot long, and eight inches broad; the handle, which is some sixteen inches in length, slants very much. With this hoe they turn up the earth instead of the plough, and prepare and open and shut the squares of irrigated fields. For reaping they make use of a small sickle without teeth. The caravans usually have a supply of these sickles for cutting up Desert provender for the camels. The use of the hoe requires constant stooping to the ground and is consequently laborious, but the Saharan fields are very limited, and are soon hoed up. The smallness of space is compensated by a redundant fertility, and double and even treble crops in the course of the year. Passing by a group of gossipping slaves to-day, one came running up to me and said, "Buy me, buy me, and I will go with you to Ghat. I shall only cost you 100 mahboubs." This is humiliating enough, but those who offer their services for sale, like hundreds in the metropolis of London, to write up a bad cause and write down a good one, or to-- "Make the worse appear The better reason--" "With words cloth'd in reason's garb--" certainly perform a greater act of degradation than these poor debased bondsmen.