chapel in the native town of Berbera, but the Brothers had also
an agricultural settlement up-country, where they tilled the soil and
did their best to teach the natives to do so too. The Somali is much
easier to convert than the Arab, as his versatile and superficial
temperament induces him to imitate, if not to assimilate, alien forms
and ceremonies from the correct procedure at the "Angelus" to the
singing, with appropriate gestures, of "a bicycle made for two."
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to teach him to think, or to do a
day's honest work; he will pull a punkah while you are awake to keep him
at it, or row a boat if allowed to sing, and sometimes he will fish if
hungry and quite near the sea; but agriculture involves the hard work of
digging, and that is too much for him. The object of the mission was to
give Somali boys and girls the rudiments of Catholic Christianity and
habits of industry. The boys were well grounded in English and the three
"R's" in their simplest form, while the girls were taught chiefly sewing
and cooking. The idea was for boys and girls to marry each other in the
fulness of time and beget Christian children, but, as one of the good
Fathers used regretfully to say, it did not work out in practice. The
boys learnt enough to become interpreters or obtain small clerkships in
the post and telegraph offices of Aden and adjacent ports, whereupon
they felt marriage with a "black woman" to be derogatory, and looked
higher, to the less swarthy charms of some half-caste maiden met at Mass
(for they usually remained Catholic, at least in outward form). The
girls, on the other hand, with all their domestic training, were much
sought after by local chiefs, who were prepared to give them a good
allowance in beads, bangles and cloth, plenty of food and a fairly easy
life. In such surroundings they naturally readopted Islam.

Somaliland is not as barren as most people suppose. Of course the
littoral plain is comparatively sterile, as is the case on the Arabian
side, owing to the scanty rainfall, and the maritime scarp of the hills
that back it is not much better, but the country improves as you go
inland; there is good grazing on the intra-montane plateau, and the
watersheds of such massifs as Wagr, Sheikh and Golis (7,000 ft. or so)
are thickly wooded, chiefly with the gigantic cactus tree, which
averages forty feet; timber trees are scarce, being mostly tall
_Coniferae_ in sheltered glens at the