GLIMPSES OF NEGRO LIFE. 631 



burrowing crabs. The walls are generally only six or seven feet 

 high, but the roof, thatched with palm leaves, rises without any 

 partition twenty feet or more above the floor. Generally the 

 hut is without any window, so that in the obscurity which reigns 

 within, it is difficult for the stranger to find his way to the 

 smaller rooms or compartments into which the interior is 

 subdivided. Some gourds and water-jugs, a few cases filled 

 with clothes, arms, and other valuables, and low wooden stools 

 ■I for the master and his chief attendants, form the only furniture. 

 The dwellings of the ' gentlemen ' have no more pretension to 

 architectural beauty than those of the humblest ' freeman,' con- 

 sisting merely of several of the huts above described clustered 

 together in the strangest confusion and communicating with 

 each other through door openings in the interior. 



If idleness were bliss the tribes inhabiting the fertile Lake 

 Kegions of Central Africa must be reckoned among the happiest 

 of mankind. Kising with the dawn from his couch of cow's 

 hide, the negro usually kindles a fire to keep out the chill of 

 the morning from his hay-stack hut, and addresses himself to 

 his constant companion the pipe. When the sun becomes suffi- 

 ciently powerful he removes the reed screen which forms the 

 entrance to his dwelling, and issues forth to bask in the morning 

 beams. After breaking his fast with a dish of porridge or 

 curded milk, he now repairs to the Iwanza, or village ' public,' 

 where in the society of his own sex he will spend the greater 

 part of the day talking and laughing, smoking or indulging in 

 copious draughts of a beer without hops, called pQmbe, the use 

 of which among the negro and negroid races dates back as far 

 as the age of Osiris. To while away the time he sits down to 

 play at heads and tails ; gambling being as violent a passion 

 in him as with the Malay or the Americian Indian. Many of 



I the Wanyamwesi have been compelled by this indulgence to 

 sell themselves into slavery, and, after playing away their pro- 

 perty, they even stake their aged mothers against the equiva- 

 lent of an old lady in these lands — a cow or a pair of goats. 

 Others, instead of gambling, indulge in some less dangerous 

 employment, which occupying the hands, leaves the rest of the 

 body and the mind at ease ; such as whittling wood, piercing 

 and airing their pipe -sticks, plucking out their beards, eye- 

 brows, and eye-lashes, or preparing and polishing their weapons. 



