lled the greatest number of animals,
returned home "King of the hunt," with a scrap of ostrich feather in his
cap.

LETTER THREE.

SOMERSET--THE BRITISH SETTLERS--ORIGINAL "OWNERS"--NATIVE CHURCH-GOING.

On my way to the Karroo I had to pass through Somerset East, and it so
fell out that I fell in with a countryman from Edinburgh, who chanced to
be going to Somerset in the same "passenger-cart" with myself. His name
must have been a novelty once, though much of its freshness is worn off
now--it was Brown.

Our cart had a hood; the roads were very bad, and the behaviour of that
hood was stupendous! Its attachment to the cart was, so to speak,
partial; therefore it possessed a semi-independent motion which was
perplexing. You could not count on its actions. A sudden lurch of the
cart to right or left did, of course, carry the hood with it, and,
counting on that, you laid your sudden plans to avoid collision; but the
elasticity of the hood enabled it to give you a slap on the face before
obeying its proper impulse. So, too, it would come down on your head
unexpectedly, or, without the slightest provocation, would hit you on
the neck behind. I learned with painful certainty in that cart that I
had a "small" to my back! It seemed to me that it grew large before the
journey was over.

Brown was an intelligent man,--not an unusual state of things with the
"Browns." He had two pretty daughters with him, aged eight and twelve
respectively. We got on well together, and crossed the Zuurberg range
in company on the last day of the year.

It was over passes in this range that the settlers of 1820 went in long
trains of Cape wagons, with wives and little ones, and household goods,
and civilised implements of husbandry, and weapons of defence, with high
hopes and strong courage, and with their "lives in their hands," to
subdue the wilderness. It was from these heights that they looked over
the beautiful and bush-clad plains of "Albany," which lay before them as
the lot of their inheritance.

The breaking up and scattering of the various "parties" was most
eloquently and graphically told by the Reverend H.H. Dugmore in a
lecture delivered at Grahamstown, on the occasion of the "British
Settlers' Jubilee," in May 1870--fifty years after the arrival of the
"fathers." [See Note 1.] I quote one passage, which gives a good idea
of the manner in which the land was taken up.

"And now the Sunday's River is crossed, an