some bit of particularly spicy scandal might be detailed and they not hear it, and life even at the best is dull enough. But we have not completed the decorating of these women; for they would be ashamed to be seen in this paucity of ornamentation. Across the middle of the forehead they wear several strings of beads, or sometimes a strip of monkey-skin, an inch wide, edged with shirt-buttons, and fastened behind the head. They also have bangles three inches to a foot long, all around the head, consisting of loose hair strung with beads of all colours. But there is still room for more, and they wear around the neck countless strings of a small blue-black bead, piled up sometimes several inches high on the shoulders. Occasionally they pierce the septum of the nose and insert a string of beads or a brass ring; and the ears are treated in the same manner. A black tattooed marking between the eyes, and two broad artistically designed lines of the same upon the cheeks running from the direction of the ear towards the mouth, complete the head-ornamentation of a fashionable Bulu woman. Upon one arm, or both, she wears an enormous cuff, made of heavy brass wire, an eighth of an inch in diameter, coiled into a solid gauntlet, large at the elbow, tapering down to the wrist and spreading again towards the hand. It is made on the arm and is not supposed to be removed. Sometimes it is worn on the upper arm, in which case it chafes the arm, and after a while causes an ulcer. These are also frequently worn on the lower leg. But for this latter purpose they prefer a large brass ring, several of which they wear on each leg, and which they keep brightly polished. A woman if she can afford it, wears as many of these brass rings as she can walk with. It is strange that they have no love of flowers, and still more strange when one considers their instinctive love of music. Passing through a village and seeing a woman performing her semi-annual duty of combing her hair, I have suggested the decorative possibilities of flowers rather than shirt-buttons. I have even gathered them for her and have put them in her hair, and I am sure they were becoming. But to her they were ridiculous; nor was she moved when I told her that white women in my country infinitely preferred flowers to shirt-buttons. The men are tattooed on their faces and their breasts; but the markings are light and scarcely disfigure the face. Every man carries at his left side a long, two-edged, sword-like knife. It is a splendid article, which they themselves manufacture. It is carried in a sheath of python-skin, suspended from a shoulder-strap of leopard-skin, though sometimes monkey-skin or goat-skin is substituted. The flint-lock gun had reached there long before our time; and every man had a gun which he carried all the time.