Muazi, and you have come from afar, have you not?” But in general women never speak to strangers unless spoken to, so anything said by them attracts attention.  Muazi once presented us with a basket of corn.  On hinting that we had no wife to grind our corn, his buxom spouse struck in with roguish glee, and said, “I will grind it for you; and leave Muazi, to accompany and cook for you in the land of the setting sun.”  As a rule the women are modest and retiring in their demeanour, and, without being oppressed with toil, show a great deal of industry.  The crops need about eight months’ attention.  Then when the harvest is home, much labour is required to convert it into food as porridge, or beer.  The corn is pounded in a large wooden mortar, like the ancient Egyptian one, with a pestle six feet long and about four inches thick.  The pounding is performed by two or even three women at one mortar.  Each, before delivering a blow with her pestle, gives an upward jerk of the body, so as to put strength into the stroke, and they keep exact time, so that two pestles are never in the mortar at the same moment.  The measured thud, thud, thud, and the women standing at their vigorous work, are associations inseparable from a prosperous African village.  By the operation of pounding, with the aid of a little water, the hard outside scale or husk of the grain is removed, and the corn is made fit for the millstone.  The meal irritates the stomach unless cleared from the husk; without considerable energy in the operator, the husk sticks fast to the corn.  Solomon thought that still more vigour than is required to separate the hard husk or bran from wheat would fail to separate “a fool from his folly.”  “Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”  The rainbow, in some parts, is called the “pestle of the Barimo,” or gods.  Boys and girls, by constant practice with the pestle, are able to plant stakes in the ground by a somewhat similar action, in erecting a hut, so deftly that they never miss the first hole made.

Let any one try by repeatedly jobbing a pole with all his force to make a deep hole in the ground, and he will understand how difficult it is always to strike it into the same spot.

As we were sleeping one night outside a hut, but near enough to hear what was going on within, an anxious mother began to grind her corn about two o’clock in the morning.  “Ma,” inquired a little girl, “why grind in the dark?” Mamma advised sleep, and administered material for a sweet dream to her darling, by saying, “I grind meal to buy a cloth from the strangers, which will make you look a little lady.”  An observer of these primitive races is struck continually with such little trivial touches of genuine human nature.