who presented themselves at her door to beg for grease, and who accounted for the dried-up condition of their legs, to which they ruefully pointed, by saying "in jail no grease get down"; the poor fellows having just been liberated from prison, where the authorities had failed to recognize unguents as a substitute for soap. I once found Khourabene sitting on the kitchen floor with his legs as far apart as those of the Colossus of Rhodes, while between them stood our black three-legged iron pot full of the cooling liquor from which a boiled ham had been lately lifted, the surface of which, with an indescribable twinkle of satisfaction, he was employed in skimming for the purposes of pomatum. It was a less objectionable application for the hair than that which was selected by a little native girl, who, having been neatly dressed on her installation as baby-carrier to a colonist's wife, emptied the contents of the lamp over her head immediately afterwards.
There was an old fellow named Isaac whom the other natives treated with a good deal of deference as chief of the tribe, and whom I amused myself with fancying that Friday's father had perhaps resembled, whose legs, when he had bestowed a little polishing on them, looked like dark old Spanish mahogany. My first acquaintance with Isaac was at a neighbouring farm-house, where he had been busy all day in carrying water to the washing copper. I was amused to see how much he enjoyed the mug of tea which he was drinking beside the kitchen hearth, and I noticed also the splendour with which his legs had been polished up, as the plentiful supply of grease to be met with at such an abode had induced him to make his toilet
