three
years ago when coals rose to L2 10s. a ton, and think how cheap I
should consider that price for fuel here, I can't help a melancholy
smile. Nine solid sovereigns purchase you a tolerable-sized load of
wood, about equal for cooking purposes to a ton of coal; but whereas
the coal is at all events some comfort and convenience to use, the
wood is only a source of additional trouble and expense. It has to be
cut up and dried, and finally coaxed and cajoled by incessant use of
the bellows into burning. Besides the price of fuel, provisions of all
sorts seem to me to be dear and bad. Milk is sold by the quart bottle:
it is now fourpence per bottle, but rises to sixpence during the
winter. Meat is eightpence a pound, but it is so thin and bony, and
of such indifferent quality, that there is very little saving in that
respect. I have not tasted any really good butter since we arrived,
and we pay two shillings a pound for cheesy, rancid stuff. I hear that
"mealies," the crushed maize, are also very dear, and so is forage for
the horses. Instead of the horses being left out on the run night and
day, summer and winter, as they used to be in New Zealand, with an
occasional feed of oats for a treat, they need to be carefully housed
at night and well fed with oaten straw and mealies to give them a
chance against the mysterious and fatal "horse-sickness," which
kills them in a few hours. Altogether, so far as my very limited
experience--of only a few weeks, remember--goes, I should say that
Natal was an expensive place to live in, owing to the scarcity and
dearness of the necessaries of life. I am told that far up in the
country food and fuel are cheap and good, and that it is the dearness
and difficulty of transport which forces Maritzburg to depend for
its supplies entirely on what is grown in its own immediate vicinity,
where there is not very much land under cultivation; so we must look
to the coming railway to remedy all that.

If only one could eat flowers, or if wheat and other cereals grew as
freely and luxuriously as flowers grow, how nice it would be! On the
open grassy downs about here the blossoms are lovely--beautiful lilies
in scarlet and white clusters, several sorts of periwinkles, heaths,
cinnerarias, both purple and white, and golden bushes of citisus or
Cape broom, load the air with fragrance. By the side of every "spruit"
or brook one sees clumps of tall arum lilies filling every little
water-washed hollow i