ing for their husbands' kitchens. The
rice is the most easily prepared grain: three women stand round a huge
wooden mortar with pestles in their hands, a gallon or so of the
unhusked rice--called Mopunga here and paddy in India--is poured in, and
the three heavy pestles worked in exact time; each jerks up her body as
she lifts the pestle and strikes it into the mortar with all her might,
lightening the labour with some wild ditty the while, though one hears
by the strained voice that she is nearly out of breath. When the husks
are pretty well loosened, the grain is put into a large plate-shaped
basket and tossed so as to bring the chaff to one side, the vessel is
then heaved downwards and a little horizontal motion given to it which
throws the refuse out; the partially cleared grain is now returned to
the mortar, again pounded and cleared of husks, and a semicircular toss
of the vessel sends all the remaining unhusked grain to one side, which
is lifted out with the hand, leaving the chief part quite clean: they
certainly work hard and well. The maize requires more labour by far: it
is first pounded to remove the outer scales from the grain, then steeped
for three days in water, then pounded, the scales again separated by the
shallow-basket tossings, then pounded fine, and the fine white flour
separated by the basket from certain hard rounded particles, which are
cooked as a sort of granular porridge--"Mtyelle."

When Ntaoeka chose to follow us rather than go to the coast, I did not
like to have a fine-looking woman among us unattached, and proposed that
she should marry one of my three worthies, Chuma, Gardner, or Mabruki,
but she smiled at the idea. Chuma was evidently too lazy ever to get a
wife; the other two were contemptible in appearance, and she has a good
presence and is buxom. Chuma promised reform: "he had been lazy, he
admitted, because he had no wife." Circumstances led to the other women
wishing Ntaoeka married, and on my speaking to her again she consented.
I have noticed her ever since working hard from morning to night: the
first up in the cold mornings, making fire and hot water, pounding,
carrying water, wood, sweeping, cooking.

_21st June, 1872._--No jugglery or sleight-of-hand, as was recommended
to Napoleon III., would have any effect in the civilization of the
Africans; they have too much good sense for that. Nothing brings them to
place thorough confidence in Europeans but a long course of well-d