e landscape, and from here one cannot perceive that the
clock does not go. Nothing can be prettier than the effect of the
red-tiled roofs and white walls peeping out from among thick clumps
of trees, whilst beyond the ground rises again to low hills with deep
purple fissures and clefts in their green sides. It is only a couple
of years since this little house was built and the garden laid out,
and yet the shrubs and trees are as big as if half a dozen years had
passed over their leafy heads. As for the roses, I never saw anything
like the way they flourish at their own sweet will. Scarcely a leaf is
to be seen on the ugly straggling tree--nothing but masses of roses of
every tint and kind and old-fashioned variety. The utmost I can do
in the way of gathering daily basketsful appears only in the light of
judicious pruning, and next day a dozen blossoms have burst forth to
supply the place of each theft of mine. And there is such a variety
of trees! Oaks and bamboos, blue gums and deodars, seem to flourish
equally well within a yard or two of each other, and the more distant
flower-beds are filled with an odd mixture of dahlias and daturas,
white fleur-de-lis and bushy geraniums, scarlet euphorbias and
verbenas. But the weeds! They are a chronic eyesore and grief to every
gardener. On path and grass-plat, flower-bed and border, they flaunt
and flourish. "Jack," the Zulu refugee, wages a feeble and totally
inadequate warfare against them with a crooked hoe, but he is only a
quarter in earnest, and stops to groan and take snuff so often that
the result is that our garden is precisely in the condition of the
garden of the sluggard, gate and all. This hingeless condition of the
gate, however, is, I must in fairness state, neither Jack's nor our
fault. It is a new gate, but no one will come out from the town to
hang it. That is my standing grievance. Because we live about a mile
from the town it is next to impossible to get anything done. The town
itself is one of the shabbiest assemblages of dwellings I have
ever seen in a colony. It is not to be named on the same day with
Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, New Zealand, which ten years
ago was decently paved and well lighted by gas. Poor sleepy Maritzburg
consists now, at more than forty years of age (Christchurch is not
twenty-five yet), of a few straight, wide, grass-grown streets, which
are only picturesque at a little distance on account of their having
trees on each