also with coursing and hawking; the Cotswolds were
the grand centre of Elizabethan sport. Here it was that Shakespeare
marked the falcon "waiting on and towering in her pride of place." Here
he saw the fallow greyhounds competing for the silver-studded collar.

What an interest and a dignity does a district such as this draw from
even the slenderest association with the splendid name of William
Shakespeare! For my part I freely confess that scenery, however grand
and sublime, appeals but little to the imagination unless it be hallowed
by association or blended in the thoughts with the recollection of those
we have either loved or admired. Thus in India, in Natal and Cape
Colony, in glorious Ceylon, I could admire those wonderful purple
mountains and that tropical luxuriance of fertility and verdure; but I
could not _feel_ them. The boundless wolds of Africa, reminding one so
much of Gloucestershire, yet far grander and far finer than anything of
the kind in England, were to me a dreary wilderness. Passing through the
fine broken hill country of Natal was like visiting chaos, a waste,
inhospitable land,

"Where no one comes
Or hath come since the making of the world."

How well I remember the first sight of the wolds of South Africa! It was
the hour of uncertain light that comes before the dawn; and as our
railway train wound its tortuous course like a snake up the awful
heights that would ultimately end in Majuba Hill--to which ill-fated
spot I was bound--the billowy waves of rolling down seemed gradually to
change to an immensely rough ocean running mountains high, and the
mimosa trees dotting the plain for hundreds of miles appeared like
armies of the souls of all the black men that ever lived on earth since
the world began. There were passes and chasms like the portals of
far-off, inaccessible Paradise,

"With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms."

And then the scene changed. The hills rose like graves of white men and
barrows to the long-forgotten dead. Great oblong barrows, round Celtic
barrows, and stately sarcophagi. Monumental effigies in alabaster,
granite and porphyry; grim Gothic castles dating back to the foundation
of the world, and grim Gothic cathedrals with long-drawn aisles, where
the "great organ of Eternity" kept thundering ceaselessly. For the
lightning and the thunder are powers to be reckoned with in those awful
realms of chaos. And then the scene chan