If they could be made to realize that foul air, insufficient dress, putrid food, alternations of feast and famine, and long bouts of sedulous idleness are destroying them as a people and need not do so, then their decay might be arrested and the fair hopes of the missionary pioneers yet be justified.

So long as they soak maize in the streams until it is rotten and eat it together with dried shark--food the merest whiff of which will make a white man sick; so long as they will wear a suit of clothes one day and a tattered blanket the next, and sit smoking crowded in huts, the reek of which strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster round dead bodies during their _tangis_ or wakes; so long as they will ignore drainage--just so long will they remain a blighted and dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there was something fateful and mysterious in their decline.

One ray of hope for them has quite lately been noted.

They are caring more for the education of their children.

Some three thousand of these now go to school, not always irregularly.