posts. A
native house in Samoa is simply a great dome-shaped roof resting upon a
ring of posts which are only about four feet high, and supported by
three central posts which are as much as twenty-five feet high. When
seen from a distance the house looks like an enormous mushroom just
rising from the ground.

The making of the roof is the great task in building one of these
houses, and the Samoans think so much of their roofs that in times of
war they have been known to take them off their posts, and carry them
away to some place which was safe from attack. The roofs are very large,
but they are so constructed that they can be taken down in three or four
pieces, and each of these may be placed upon a raft made of canoes, and
carried away by sea.

Although it would perhaps be difficult to find movable roofs so large as
these in other countries, there are many houses in Africa which are
constructed in a similar way, and are little more than roofs resting
upon a few posts, from which they can be easily removed. Dr. Livingstone
saw a great many of them in the heart of Africa, and the villagers, with
whom he and his men stayed for the night, frequently took off the roofs
of their huts, and lent them to the travellers. As soon as the natives
learned where Livingstone had decided to encamp, they lifted off the
roofs of some of their huts and brought them to him. Livingstone's men
propped up the roofs with a number of small posts, and the houses were
made. The roofs kept off the rain, and in that warm country no other
shelter was needed. On one occasion it rained so heavily that the water
flowed in along the ground, and flooded the travellers' beds. To prevent
such an accident occurring again, Livingstone made his men in future dig
a trench round the hut, and throw the earth inwards to raise the ground
under the roof. By this means the rain-water was caught in the trench,
and the beds lay high and dry upon the raised floor of the hut. When the
travellers moved onward to another village, they left the roofs just as
they were, and the villagers put them back in their proper places at
their leisure. The roofs were always lent by the natives without any
expectation of receiving payment for their use, though I have no doubt
that the noble-minded missionary never forgot to reward them.

When Speke, a traveller who discovered one of the sources of the Nile,
was returning homeward, and passing through the country of the Madi,
near t