casionally seen fishing from the rocks with hooks.

A net with small meshes is used for catching the young fry of a silvery
kind like pickerel, when they are about two inches long; thousands are
often taken in a single haul. We had a present of a large bucketful one
day for dinner: they tasted as if they had been cooked with a little
quinine, probably from their gall-bladders being left in. In deep water,
some sorts are taken by lowering fish-baskets attached by a long cord to
a float, around which is often tied a mass of grass or weeds, as an
alluring shade for the deep-sea fish. Fleets of fine canoes are engaged
in the fisheries. The men have long paddles, and stand erect while using
them. They sometimes venture out when a considerable sea is running. Our
Makololo acknowledge that, in handling canoes, the Lake men beat them;
they were unwilling to cross the Zambesi even, when the wind blew fresh.

Though there are many crocodiles in the lake, and some of an
extraordinary size, the fishermen say that it is a rare thing for any one
to be carried off by these reptiles. When crocodiles can easily obtain
abundance of fish--their natural food--they seldom attack men; but when
unable to see to catch their prey, from the muddiness of the water in
floods, they are very dangerous.

Many men and boys are employed in gathering the buaze, in preparing the
fibre, and in making it into long nets. The knot of the net is different
from ours, for they invariably use what sailors call the reef knot, but
they net with a needle like that we use. From the amount of native
cotton cloth worn in many of the southern villages, it is evident that a
great number of hands and heads must be employed in the cultivation of
cotton, and in the various slow processes through which it has to pass,
before the web is finished in the native loom. In addition to this
branch of industry, an extensive manufacture of cloth, from the inner
bark of an undescribed tree, of the botanical group, _Caesalpineae_, is
ever going on, from one end of the lake to the other; and both toil and
time are required to procure the bark, and to prepare it by pounding and
steeping it to render it soft and pliable. The prodigious amount of the
bark clothing worn indicates the destruction of an immense number of
trees every year; yet the adjacent heights seem still well covered with
timber.

The Lake people are by no means handsome: the women are _very_ plain; and
real