itement. A Cape cart, with
a Chinese coolie driver, and four horses apparently put in harness
together for the first time, was waiting for us and our luggage at the
post-office. We got into it, and straight-way began to plunge through
the sandy streets once more, turning off the high-road and beginning
almost immediately to climb with pain and difficulty the red sandy
slopes of the Berea, a beautiful wooded upland dotted with villas. The
road is terrible for man and beast, and we had to stop every few yards
to breathe the horses. At last our destination is reached, through
fields of sugar-cane and plantations of coffee, past luxuriant fruit
trees, rustling, broad-leafed bananas and encroaching greenery of
all sorts, to a clearing where a really handsome house stands, with
hospitable, wide-open doors, awaiting us. Yes, a good big bath first,
then a cup of tea, and now we are ready for a saunter in the twilight
on the wide level terrace (called by the ugly Dutch name "stoop")
which runs round three sides of the house. How green and fragrant and
still it all is! Straight-way the glare of the long sunny day, the
rattle and jolting of the post-cart, the toil through the sand, all
slip away from mind and memory, and the tranquil delicious present,
"with its-odors of rest and of love," slips in to soothe and calm our
jaded senses. Certainly, it is hotter here than in Maritzburg--that
assertion we are prepared to die in defence of--but we acknowledge
that the heat at this hour is _not_ oppressive, and the tropical
luxuriance of leaf and flower all around is worth a few extra degrees
of temperature. Of course, our talk is of to-morrow, and we look
anxiously at the purpling clouds to the west.

"A fine day," says our host; and so it ought to be with five thousand
people come from far and wide to see the sight. Why, that is more
than a quarter of the entire white population of Natal! Bed and sleep
become very attractive suggestions, though made indecently soon after
dinner, and it is somewhere about ten o'clock when they are carried
out, and, like Lord Houghton's famous "fair little girl," we

Know nothing more till again it is day.

A fine day, too, is this same New Year's Day of 1876--a glorious
day--sunny of course, but with a delicious breeze stealing among the
flowers and shrubs in capricious puffs, and snatching a differing
scent from each heavy cluster of blossom it visits. By mid-day F----
has got himself into his gol