a ringing blast
on his bugle, and cried, "Walk along, Lord Gifford! think as you've
another Victoriar Cross to get top o' this hill! Walk along, Lord
Carnarvon! you ain't sitting in a cab'net council _here_, you know.
Don't leave Sir Garnet do all the work, you know. Forward, my lucky
lads! creep up it!" and by the time he had shrieked out this and a
lot more patter, behold! we were at the top of the hill, and a fresh,
lovely landscape was lying smiling in the sunshine below us. It was
a beautiful country we passed through, but, except for a scattered
homestead here and there by the roadside, not a sign of a human
dwelling on all its green and fertile slopes. How the railway is to
drag itself up and round all those thousand and one spurs running into
each other, with no distinct valley or flat between, is best known to
the engineers and surveyors, who have declared it practicable. To the
non-professional eye it seems not only difficult, but impossible. But
oh how it is wanted! All along the road shrill bugle-blasts warned the
slow, trailing ox-wagons, with their naked "forelooper" at their head,
to creep aside out of our way, I counted one hundred and twenty wagons
that day on fifty miles of road. Now, if one considers that each of
these wagons is drawn by a span of some thirty or forty oxen, one has
some faint idea of how such a method of transport must waste and use
up the material of the country. Something like ten thousand oxen toil
over this one road summer and winter, and what wonder is it not only
that merchandise costs more to fetch up from D'Urban to Maritzburg
than it does to bring it out from England, but that beef is dear and
bad! As transport pays better than farming, we hear on all sides of
farms thrown out of cultivation, and as a necessary consequence milk,
butter, and so forth are scarce and poor, and in the neighborhood of
Maritzburg, at least, it is esteemed a favor to let you have either at
exorbitant prices and of most inferior quality. When one looks round
at these countless acres of splendid grazing-land, making a sort of
natural park on either hand, it seems like a bad dream to know that we
have constantly to use preserved milk and potted meat as being cheaper
and easier to procure than fresh.

No one was in any mood, however, to discuss political economy that
beautiful day, and we laughed and chatted, and ate a great many
luncheons, chiefly of tea and peaches, all the way along. Our driver
enl