The natives have a great many customs or holy days in the course of the year, during which it is unbearable to live in the town, such is the noise and uproar of the rabble. Their yells, roaring, and discord are indescribable. They have a sort of rude drum, about four feet in length, and one in diameter, called _tenti_ or _kin Kasi_. This is carried on a man’s head in a horizontal position, and is beaten by another man walking behind him, who hammers away like a smith on his anvil, without any regard to time. This huge drum is accompanied by horns and long wooden pipes, the sound of which resembles the bellowing of oxen. The procession parades up and down the town nearly the whole day, and keeps up an irregular fire of musketry. On all these occasions an immense quantity of rum (which is only threepence per pint) is drunk. If any person of note dies, the relatives and neighbours assemble in front of his house, and continue drinking and smoking, yelling and firing off guns nearly the whole of the day; and one of the family invariably sacrifices a dog, to procure a safe passage to Heaven for the deceased. If none of the deceased’s relations happen to have a dog in their possession, they sally out in a party and kill the first dog they meet. They are very superstitious also respecting burial, and frequently bury the gold rings and trinkets worn by the deceased along with his body, so that the graves are frequently opened again for the sake of the property contained in them. An instance of this occurred while I was there. A Mrs. Brown, the widowed mother of a mulatto so named, who had been employed as interpreter on board the _Albert_ steamer in the late Niger expedition, died in consequence of a blow from a younger son. The elder brother, having been much straitened in his circumstances through misconduct, ordered his mother to be interred in the same grave as one of her daughters, who had been buried with all her trinkets upon her. Brown, as an excuse, declared that it was customary to bury the parent below, and the sons and daughters above. Thus the sister was disinterred and stripped of her ornaments, which he put, as he no doubt thought, to a better use than leaving them for the worms.