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CHAP. VI. ROFIA CLOTH. — NATIVE BASKETS. 151 loom extremely simple; the process is laborious and slow. At other times I have seen the people, as I passed through the villages, arranging the threads for their warp, under the shade of overspreading trees outside their dwellings. The coloured patterns of finer cloths are produced by dying the threads, not by colouring or printing the cloth after it is woven. Hence they resemble what in England are called gingham and plaid patterns. These patterns are arranged with great exactness and taste, and the colours, almost always rich and deep, are much more varied and numerous than might be expected, considering the ignorance of chemistry in their formation. I saw many articles of dress, such as cloaks, coats, jackets, and waistcoats, made of rofia cloth, both in Madagascar and Mauritius, and was surprised at the fresh ness of the colours even in the oldest cloths. Native baskets of various sizes and materials were also brought to me for sale. Some of these were oblong, like a lady’s work-box in size, and generally woven in a neat pattern of red and white, or with the addition of black. Others were smaller and square, covered with a lid to which a handle was attached in a curious manner. But the most beautiful was a small kind of basket or woven box, made of a silvery white kind of grass split into very fine threads or strips, plaited with extreme neatness, and almost endless diversity of beau tiful pattern. These boxes are oblong or square, and vary in size from half an inch to two, three, or nine inches square. Nothing can surpass the delicacy of the workmanship of these articles, in which, like the mats, there is no careless joining, loose thread, or unfinished part to be found. What renders them more remarkable is that they are all, even the smallest, lined with a different kind of plait, so that they have the same firmness, durability, and general completeness as the matting. Without losing anything of this, they are many of them so small as scarcely to contain a lady’s ring, and cer- L 4