XX NOTES ON LIFE OF THE AFRICAN NATIVE 197 
other lips and other eyes, and finally decide to take 
a second wife. The first wife may feel the pangs 
of jealousy and the humiliation of being superseded 
in her husband’s affections by another, but these 
trifles she will have to look at philosophically, or to 
put it expressively, if vulgarly, she will have to 
‘lump it.’ For his second wife, our amorous native 
must build a new hut, and to her he must give a bed 
of her own, while she provides a mat. Now, he 
chiefly confines his attentions to hunting and fishing, 
and making expeditions into the forest for honey, 
bees-wax and rubber, leaving his wives to do most 
of the manual labour in the shamba. 
Bye and bye, if he is well-to-do, he may decide to 
add another wife to his household, and from this 
event, we may roughly date the beginning of his 
declining years. His physical powers begin to 
wane, and he passes his time in the village 
gossiping, very much as the aged English villager 
does in the village inn. By this time he has a 
family of one, two, or three children, large families 
being an exception, and these children, especially 
the girls, assist their mother in the housework. 
Sometimes, he will make little trips to adjacent 
villages and exchange a fowl for some tobacco 
or for seed for his garden. With such trifles he 
whiles away the time. 
At thirty-five to forty he is an old man, and then 
