“CURRENT COIN” IN ABYSSINIA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 674, 30 January 1885, Page 4

“CURRENT COIN” IN ABYSSINIA.

There are no shops in Adowa or in any other Abyssinian town. All trade is done within the trader’s home or compound over a glass of tedge or mattie. Flour is ground by the women of the house ; on the premises bread is made ; tedge and mead are brewed in each household. Each house rears its own cattle as well as children—baby, goats, and lambs, fowls, and chickens are brought up together, and are playmates from their youth. The Marie Therese dollar-piece is the only coin. Cloth and bars of rock salt ten inches long by two wide and deep, bound with a reed, serve as their ordinary medium of barter. Members of our mission traded a good deal with empty beer bottles, receiving two chickens and a dozen eggs for a quart. I msde everlasting friendship with a village chief by making him a present of an empty Worcester-sauce bottle; the glass stopper appearing to be a source of delight and comfort to him, Abyssinians seem to require

“ but little here below ” as regards variety in their diet, and are very conservative as to the paucity of vegetables. Onions, with another savory plant almost as obnoxious to the nasal organs, with the addition of capsicums, are all they seem to care about. Potatoes were introduced some time ago, but are never allowed to come to maturity, and are eaten green. M. , the only European resident in the country, who came to Abyssinia to repair muskets, introduced watercress, which now grows near all the brooks round about Adowa, but the natives do not patronise it. When the gunsmith called upon the Admiral to pay his respects, with that flowery politeness proverbial to Frenchmen, he presented him with a bouquet of these pungent little leaves, and supplied us ever afterward while we remained in Adowa. This solitary man of Marseilles had lived in the country over fifteen years, and had only been once back to his native land. He was now making good money out of his smithy, and seemed quite content. —The English Illustrated Magazine for December.