thus vultures are supplied with
a continual feast, while carcasses and skulls, and bleaching bones, are
familiar objects by the roadsides on the plains.

At last the mail-cart arrived, and I secured a place.

It is usually a small two-wheeled vehicle drawn by four horses, the
driver of which seems to think that every one ought to possess an iron
frame as callous as his own. The cart has a species of canvas hood,
such as I have described in a former letter, stretched on a movable
frame. It serves the purpose of a monstrous parasol. You get into this
cart, the team is cleverly started by, it may be, a smart fellow, and
driven away with the speed at which mails ought to travel; or it is
wildly started by a conceited driver, who sets out with a plunge, and
continues his course with a prolonged crash, as though the fate of
empires reposed in his mail-bags. You come to a ditch; you go in with a
plunge, and come out with a jerk. Your head hits the back of the hood
when you go in, your nose hits the back of the driver when you come out.
A rut in the road causes one wheel to descend suddenly about eighteen
inches; or an unavoidable lump of that height produces the same effect;
the hood gives you a deliberate punch on the head. Before you have
quite recovered, it gives you another. A miniature precipice appears.
This was caused by the latest waterspout choosing to cut the road
instead of follow it. The mail-cart does not pause. Its springs were
made, apparently, to spring. It descends. For one instant you are left
in the air, the next you resume your seat--with violence. This sort of
thing does not last long, however, for you quickly become wise. You
acquire the habit of voluntarily stiffening your backbone at the
ditches, of yielding to the ruts, and of holding on at the precipices.
Still, with all your precautions, you suffer severely. I have been
seriously informed that, during some of their plunges on what may be
called stormy roads, men have been jolted bodily out of mail-carts at
the Cape, and I can easily believe it.

The Diamond-field mail was full, but they kindly made room for me, and
plastered my portmanteau, like an excrescence, on the other baggage.

The drive to Bedford was too short to admit of much familiar intercourse
with the diggers,--if diggers they were. Subsequently I met with a
successful digger, who told me a good deal about the diamond-fields. He
was a Scot, who had left a lucrative cla