130 



THE FAIR. 



(E^ungo), his club, his sword, and his shield, but 

 few owned muskets. Some had come from afar, 

 as was shown by their low wooden stools and 

 small churning staves. The women were more 

 numerous, and harder worked ; the girls were 

 bare-breasted, and every matron had her babe 

 tied in a bundle to the back, its round black 

 head nodding with every movement of the ma- 

 ternal person. Yet it never cries — that model 

 baby ! They carried, besides masses of beads 

 strung round the neck, zinc and brass armlets all 

 down the arms, and huge collars and anklets of 

 metal, heavy loads of valuable stuff ; and others 

 sat opposite their belongings, chaffering and ges- 

 ticulating upon knotty questions of fragmentary 

 farthings. These ill-used and hard-favoured be- 

 ings, with patterns burnt into their skins, paid 

 toll for ingress at a place where cords were 

 stretched across the path, a primitive style of 

 raising octroi. The Eedawin exchanged their 

 lean sheep and goats, cocoas and bananas, grain 

 and ghee, for white and blue cottons, beads, and 

 rude iron ware — knives, bills, and hatchets, made 

 on the coast of metal brought from Zanzibar. The 

 luxuries were dried fish, salt, Tembo or cocoa - 

 toddy, spices, needles and thread, fish-hooks, and 

 bluestone used in their rude medicine, formerly 



