The last-mentioned instrument is a large wooden mortar made by the Loubles, a wandering class of Foolahs, one of the most stunted and ugly of African races, and quite different from the pastoral and warrior tribes.  These roving gipsies work in wood, and may be called the coopers of Africa.  When they find a convenient spot of ground furnished with the proper kind of trees, they immediately proceed to cut them down:  the branches are formed into temporary huts, and the trunks are made into canoes, bowls, pestles and mortars, and other wooden utensils.  Their chief implements are an axe and a knife, which they use with great dexterity.

The freemen are very indolent, and, with the exception of the Foolahs, seldom engage in any useful work.  The time not occupied in hunting, fishing, travelling, or public business, is usually spent in indolent smoking, gossipping, or revelling.  The male slaves are employed in felling timber, weaving, drawing water, collecting grass for horses, and helping the women in the fields; but as all this, excepting the first, can be done by females, the slaveholders do not care to keep many male slaves.  Women generally attend to field-work.  Before the rains set in, they make holes in the ground with a hoe, and, after dropping in seeds, cover in the earth with their feet.  In case of rice, the surface of the ground is turned up with a narrow spade.  After the rains the grain is ripe, and the tops are cut off.  When the natives have not separate store-huts of their own, they keep their corn in large rush-baskets raised upon stakes outside the village; and these stores are not violated by their fellow-townsmen.  The grain is beaten or trodden out of the husks, and then winnowed in the wind.  The women pound it into meal or flour with a pestle nearly five feet long, the ordinary mortar containing about two gallons.  This is a most laborious process, and occupies many hours of the day or night.

After gratifying, if not satisfying, the curiosity of Samba’s wives, we thought it right that a return should be made by their explaining to us their mode of dressing food, especially the celebrated kooskoos.  This was cheerfully done, the more so as we presented them with small articles of tinselled finery.  The flour is moistened with water, then shaken and stirred in a calabash until it forms into small hard granules like peppercorns, which will keep good for a long time if preserved in a dry place.  The poorer class wet this prepared grain with hot water until it swells like rice; others steam it in an earthen pot with holes, which is placed above another containing flesh and water, so that the flavour of the meat makes the kooskoos savoury.  We saw a dish of this kind in preparation for our dinner, along with other stews of a daintier kind, made of rice boiled with milk and dried fish, or with butter and meat, not forgetting vegetables and condiments.  Some, of these stews, when well prepared, are not to be despised.