cases tastefully decorated with paintings, somewhat resembling the arabesque designs one sees amongst the Moors. No doubt this art and that of designing fantastic figures on brass dishes, which they buy from the Europeans and afterwards embellish with the aid of a big-headed nail and a hammer, comes to them from the Mohammedans of the Niger, of whom they used to see a good deal in former days.
With regard to the dress of these people, I have not anything so interesting to relate about them as I had of the New Calabar gentlemen. Except on high days and holidays, there is little to distinguish the upper classes here from the same classes in any of the other rivers of the Protectorate, except that it might be in the peculiar way they knot the loin cloth on, leaving it to trail a little on the ground on one side, and their great liking for scarlet and other bright coloured stove-pipe hats. On their high festivals the kings appear in crowns and silk garments; the chiefs, who do not stick to the native gala garments of many-hued silks, generally appear in European clothes, not always of irreproachable fit, their queen, as every chief calls his head wife, appearing in a gorgeous silk costume that may have been worn several seasons before at Ascot or Goodwood by a London belle. Sometimes you may be treated to the sight of a dusky queen gaily displaying her ample charms in a low-cut secondhand dinner or ball dress that may have created a sensation when first worn at some swagger function in London or Paris. As the native ladies do not wear stays, and one of the greatest attributes of female beauty in Calabar is plumpness, and plenty of it, you may imagine that the local modiste has her wits greatly exercised in devising means to fill up the gaping space between the hooks and eyes. I once heard a
