The banana, planted with a careless hand, supplies the staff of life, besides thatch, fuel, and fibre for nets and lines:  when they want cereals, maize, holcus, and panicum will grow almost spontaneously.  The various palm-trees give building materials, oil, wine, and other requisites too numerous to mention.  The “five products of the cow” are ignored, as in the western hemisphere of yore:  one of the most useful, however, is produced by the Nje or Njeve, a towering butyraceous tree, differing from that which bears the Shea butternut.  Its produce is sun-dried, toasted over a fire, pounded and pressed in a bag between two boards, when it is ready for use.  The bush, cut at the end, is fired before the beginning, of the rains, leaving the land ready for yams and sweet potatoes almost without using the hoe.  In the middle dries, from June to September, the villagers sally forth en masse for a battue of elephants, whose spoils bring various luxuries from the coast.  Lately, before my arrival, they had turned out to gather the Aba, or wild mango, for Odika sauce; and during this season they will do nothing else.  The Fan plant their own tobacco, which is described as a low, spreading plant, and despise the imported weed; they neither snuff nor chew.  All manufacture their own pipe-bowls, and they are not ignorant of the use of Lyamba or Hashish.  They care little for sugar, contrary to the rule of Africa in general, but they over-salt all their food; and they will suck the condiment as children do lollipops.  Their palm oil is very poor, as if they had only just learned the art of making it.

After the daily siesta, which lasted till 3 P. M., Mr. Tippet asked me to put in an appearance at a solemn dance which, led by the king’s eldest daughter, was being performed in honour of the white visitor.  A chair was placed in the verandah, the street being the ballroom.  Received with the usual salutation, “Mbolane,” to which the reply is “An,” I proceeded to the external study of Fan womanhood.  Whilst the men are tall and elances, their partners are usually short and stout, and,

“Her stature tall, I hate a dumpy woman,”

is a matter of taste upon which most of us agree with his lordship.  This peculiar breadth of face and person probably result from hard work and good fare, developing adipose tissue.  I could not bring myself to admire Gondebiza, the princess royal,—­ what is grotesque in one sex becomes unsightly in the other.  Fat, thirty, and perhaps once fair, her charms had seen their prime, and the system of circles and circlets which composed her personnel had assumed a tremulous and gravitating tendency.  She was habited in the height of Fan fashion.  Her body was modestly invested in a thin pattern of tattoo, and a gauze-work of oil and camwood; the rest of the toilette was a dwarf pigeon-tail of fan-palm, like that of the men, and a manner of apron, white beads, and tree bark, greasy and reddened:  the latter