AMONG THE KIKUYUS AND THE NANDI require about ten days to build a shelter. The wood used is soft, and the kind is regulated by the government, which charges sixty-six cents for enough lumber to build one shack.

Besides its huts, each family has two or three granaries for its supply of Indian corn. These are made with thatched roofs, wicker walls and wicker floors, and are raised a foot or eighteen inches off the ground. They are usually about as big around as a hogshead and six feet high.

The Kikuyus are practically vegetarians. They live on corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and a kind of millet. They have a few cattle and some sheep, but they consider them too valuable to be slaughtered and only eat them when the cattle are sick or become injured in some way and have to be killed. They have no chickens, and eat neither fowls nor eggs. This is because, in the past, the crowing of cocks would give away the locality of a village, thereby bringing down its enemies and the slave traders upon it.

These people have many dishes like ours. They eat roasting ears off the cob, and they boil beans and corn together to make a kind of succotash. They have also a gruel made of millet and milk, and if one of the family becomes sick he is sometimes given mutton broth. In their cooking they use clay jars which they rest upon stones above fires built on the ground. They use gourds for carrying milk and water, and bags of woven bark rang¬ ing in size from a pint to four bushels are used for all sorts of purposes. The larger ones serve for the transportation of their grain to the markets.

The Kikuyu looks upon the females of his family as so 279