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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Letters from the Cape, by Lady Duff Gordon
+
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+Title: Letters from the Cape
+
+Author: Lady Duff Gordon
+
+Release Date: April, 1997  [EBook #886]
+[This file was first posted on April 24, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 11, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, LETTERS FROM THE CAPE ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1921 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.  Second proof by Margaret Price.
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS FROM THE CAPE
+
+
+
+
+LETTER I--THE VOYAGE
+
+
+
+Wednesday, 24th July.
+Off the Scilly Isles, 6 P.M.
+
+When I wrote last Sunday, we put our pilot on shore, and went down
+Channel.  It soon came on to blow, and all night was squally and
+rough.  Captain on deck all night.  Monday, I went on deck at
+eight.  Lovely weather, but the ship pitching as you never saw a
+ship pitch--bowsprit under water.  By two o'clock a gale came on;
+all ordered below.  Captain left dinner, and, about six, a sea
+struck us on the weather side, and washed a good many unconsidered
+trifles overboard, and stove in three windows on the poop; nurse
+and four children in fits; Mrs. T- and babies afloat, but good-
+humoured as usual.  Army-surgeon and I picked up children and
+bullied nurse, and helped to bale cabin.  Cuddy window stove in,
+and we were wetted.  Went to bed at nine; could not undress, it
+pitched so, and had to call doctor to help me into cot; slept
+sound.  The gale continues.  My cabin is water-tight as to big
+splashes, but damp and dribbling.  I am almost ashamed to like such
+miseries so much.  The forecastle is under water with every lurch,
+and the motion quite incredible to one only acquainted with
+steamers.  If one can sit this ship, which bounds like a tiger, one
+should sit a leap over a haystack.  Evidently, I can never be sea-
+sick; but holding on is hard work, and writing harder.
+
+Life is thus:- Avery--my cuddy boy--brings tea for S-, and milk for
+me, at six.  S- turns out; when she is dressed, I turn out, and
+sing out for Avery, who takes down my cot, and brings a bucket of
+salt water, in which I wash with vast danger and difficulty; get
+dressed, and go on deck at eight.  Ladies not allowed there
+earlier.  Breakfast solidly at nine.  Deck again; gossip; pretend
+to read.  Beer and biscuit at twelve.  The faithful Avery brings
+mine on deck.  Dinner at four.  Do a little carpentering in cabin,
+all the outfitters' work having broken loose.  I am now in the
+captain's cabin, writing.  We have the wind as ever, dead against
+us; and as soon as we get unpleasantly near Scilly, we shall tack
+and stand back to the French coast, where we were last night.
+Three soldiers able to answer roll-call, all the rest utterly sick;
+three middies helpless.  Several of crew, ditto.  Passengers very
+fairly plucky; but only I and one other woman, who never was at sea
+before, well.  The food on board our ship is good as to meat,
+bread, and beer; everything else bad.  Port and sherry of British
+manufacture, and the water with an incredible borachio, essence of
+tar; so that tea and coffee are but derisive names.
+
+To-day, the air is quite saturated with wet, and I put on my
+clothes damp when I dressed, and have felt so ever since.  I am so
+glad I was not persuaded out of my cot; it is the whole difference
+between rest, and holding on for life.  No one in a bunk slept at
+all on Monday night; but then it blew as heavy a gale as it can
+blow, and we had the Cornish coast under our lee.  So we tacked and
+tumbled all night.  The ship being new, too, has the rigging all
+wrong; and the confusion and disorder are beyond description.  The
+ship's officers are very good fellows.  The mizen is entirely
+worked by the 'young gentlemen'; so we never see the sailors, and,
+at present, are not allowed to go forward.  All lights are put out
+at half-past ten, and no food allowed in the cabin; but the latter
+article my friend Avery makes light of, and brings me anything when
+I am laid up.  The young soldier-officers bawl for him with
+expletives; but he says, with a snigger, to me, 'They'll just wait
+till their betters, the ladies, is looked to.'  I will write again
+some day soon, and take the chance of meeting a ship; you may be
+amused by a little scrawl, though it will probably be very stupid
+and ill-written, for it is not easy to see or to guide a pen while
+I hold on to the table with both legs and one arm, and am first on
+my back and then on my nose.  Adieu, till next time.  I have had a
+good taste of the humours of the Channel.
+
+29th July, 4 Bells, i.e. 2 o'clock, p.m.--When I wrote last, I
+thought we had had our share of contrary winds and foul weather.
+Ever since, we have beaten about the bay with the variety of a
+favourable gale one night for a few hours, and a dead calm
+yesterday, in which we almost rolled our masts out of the ship.
+However, the sun was hot, and I sat and basked on deck, and we had
+morning service.  It was a striking sight, with the sailors seated
+on oars and buckets, covered with signal flags, and with their
+clean frocks and faces.  To-day is so cold that I dare not go on
+deck, and am writing in my black-hole of a cabin, in a green light,
+with the sun blinking through the waves as they rush over my port
+and scuttle.  The captain is much vexed at the loss of time.  I
+persist in thinking it a very pleasant, but utterly lazy life.  I
+sleep a great deal, but don't eat much, and my cough has been bad;
+but, considering the real hardship of the life--damp, cold, queer
+food, and bad drink--I think I am better.  When we can get past
+Finisterre, I shall do very well, I doubt not.
+
+The children swarm on board, and cry unceasingly.  A passenger-ship
+is no place for children.  Our poor ship will lose her character by
+the weather, as she cannot fetch up ten days' lost time.  But she
+is evidently a race-horse.  We overhaul everything we see, at a
+wonderful rate, and the speed is exciting and pleasant; but the
+next long voyage I make, I'll try for a good wholesome old
+'monthly' tub, which will roll along on the top of the water,
+instead of cutting through it, with the waves curling in at the
+cuddy skylights.  We tried to signal a barque yesterday, and send
+home word 'all well'; but the brutes understood nothing but
+Russian, and excited our indignation by talking 'gibberish ' to us;
+which we resented with true British spirit, as became us.
+
+It is now blowing hard again, and we have just been taken right
+aback.  Luckily, I had lashed my desk to my washing-stand, or that
+would have flown off, as I did off my chair.  I don't think I shall
+know what to make of solid ground under my feet.  The rolling and
+pitching of a ship of this size, with such tall masts, is quite
+unlike the little niggling sort of work on a steamer--it is the
+difference between grinding along a bad road in a four-wheeler, and
+riding well to hounds in a close country on a good hunter.  I was
+horribly tired for about five days, but now I rather like it, and
+never know whether it blows or not in the night, I sleep so
+soundly.  The noise is beyond all belief; the creaking, trampling,
+shouting, clattering; it is an incessant storm.  We have not yet
+got our masts quite safe; the new wire-rigging stretches more than
+was anticipated (of course), and our main-topmast is shaky.  The
+crew have very hard work, as incessant tacking is added to all the
+extra work incident to a new ship.  On Saturday morning, everybody
+was shouting for the carpenter.  My cabin was flooded by a leak,
+and I superintended the baling and swabbing from my cot, and
+dressed sitting on my big box.  However, I got the leak stopped and
+cabin dried, and no harm done, as I had put everything up off the
+floor the night before, suspicious of a dribble which came in.
+Then my cot frame was broken by my cuddy boy and I lurching over
+against S-'s bunk, in taking it down.  The carpenter has given me
+his own, and takes my broken one for himself.  Board ship is a
+famous place for tempers.  Being easily satisfied, I get all I
+want, and plenty of attention and kindness; but I cannot prevail on
+my cuddy boy to refrain from violent tambourine-playing with a tin
+tray just at the ear of a lady who worries him.  The young soldier-
+officers, too, I hear mentioned as 'them lazy gunners', and they
+struggle for water and tea in the morning long after mine has come.
+We have now been ten days at sea, and only three on which we could
+eat without the 'fiddles' (transverse pieces of wood to prevent the
+dishes from falling off).  Smooth water will seem quite strange to
+me.  I fear the poor people in the forecastle must be very wet and
+miserable, as the sea is constantly over it, not in spray, but in
+tons of green water.
+
+3d Aug.--We had two days of dead calm, then one or two of a very
+light, favourable breeze, and yesterday we ran 175 miles with the
+wind right aft.  We saw several ships, which signalled us, but we
+would not answer, as we had our spars down for repairs and looked
+like a wreck, and fancied it would be a pity to frighten you all
+with a report to that effect.
+
+Last night we got all right, and spread out immense studding-sails.
+We are now bowling along, wind right aft, dipping our studding-sail
+booms into the water at every roll.  The weather is still
+surprisingly cold, though very fine, and I have to come below quite
+early, out of the evening air.  The sun sets before seven o'clock.
+I still cough a good deal, and the bad food and drink are trying.
+But the life is very enjoyable; and as I have the run of the
+charts, and ask all sorts of questions, I get plenty of amusement.
+S- is an excellent traveller; no grumbling, and no gossiping,
+which, on board a ship like ours, is a great merit, for there is ad
+nauseam of both.
+
+Mr.--is writing a charade, in which I have agreed to take a part,
+to prevent squabbling.  He wanted to start a daily paper, but the
+captain wisely forbade it, as it must have led to personalities and
+quarrels, and suggested a play instead.  My little white Maltese
+goat is very well, and gives plenty of milk, which is a great
+resource, as the tea and coffee are abominable.  Avery brings it me
+at six, in a tin pannikin, and again in the evening.  The chief
+officer is well-bred and agreeable, and, indeed, all the young
+gentlemen are wonderfully good specimens of their class.  The
+captain is a burly foremast man in manner, with a heart of wax and
+every feeling of a gentleman.  He was in California, 'HIDE
+DROGHING' with Dana, and he says every line of Two Years before the
+Mast is true.  He went through it all himself.  He says that I am a
+great help to him, as a pattern of discipline and punctuality.
+People are much inclined to miss meals, and then want things at odd
+hours, and make the work quite impossible to the cook and servants.
+Of course, I get all I want in double-quick time, as I try to save
+my man trouble; and the carpenter leaves my scuttle open when no
+one else gets it, quite willing to get up in his time of sleep to
+close it, if it comes on to blow.  A maid is really a superfluity
+on board ship, as the men rather like being 'aux petits soins'.
+The boatswain came the other day to say that he had a nice carpet
+and a good pillow; did I want anything of the sort?  He would be
+proud that I should use anything of his.  You would delight in
+Avery, my cuddy man, who is as quick as 'greased lightning', and
+full of fun.  His misery is my want of appetite, and his efforts to
+cram me are very droll.  The days seem to slip away, one can't tell
+how.  I sit on deck from breakfast at nine, till dinner at four,
+and then again till it gets cold, and then to bed.  We are now
+about 100 miles from Madeira, and shall have to run inside it, as
+we were thrown so far out of our course by the foul weather.
+
+9th Aug.--Becalmed, under a vertical sun.  Lat. 17 degrees, or
+thereabouts.  We saw Madeira at a distance like a cloud; since
+then, we had about four days trade wind, and then failing or
+contrary breezes.  We have sailed so near the African shore that we
+get little good out of the trades, and suffer much from the African
+climate.  Fancy a sky like a pale February sky in London, no sun to
+be seen, and a heat coming, one can't tell from whence.  To-day,
+the sun is vertical and invisible, the sea glassy and heaving.  I
+have been ill again, and obliged to lie still yesterday and the day
+before in the captain's cabin; to-day in my own, as we have the
+ports open, and the maindeck is cooler than the upper.  The men
+have just been holystoning here, singing away lustily in chorus.
+Last night I got leave to sling my cot under the main hatchway, as
+my cabin must have killed me from suffocation when shut up.  Most
+of the men stayed on deck, but that is dangerous after sunset on
+this African coast, on account of the heavy dew and fever.  They
+tell me that the open sea is quite different; certainly, nothing
+can look duller and dimmer than this specimen of the tropics.  The
+few days of trade wind were beautiful and cold, with sparkling sea,
+and fresh air and bright sun; and we galloped along merrily.
+
+We are now close to the Cape de Verd Islands, and shall go inside
+them.  About lat. 4 degrees N. we expect to catch the S.E. trade
+wind, when it will be cold again.  In lat. 24 degrees, the day
+before we entered the tropics, I sat on deck in a coat and cloak;
+the heat is quite sudden, and only lasts a week or so.  The sea to-
+day is littered all round the ship with our floating rubbish, so we
+have not moved at all.
+
+I constantly long for you to be here, though I am not sure you
+would like the life as well as I do.  All your ideas of it are
+wrong; the confinement to the poop and the stringent regulations
+would bore you.  But then, sitting on deck in fine weather is
+pleasure enough, without anything else.  In a Queen's ship, a
+yacht, or a merchantman with fewer passengers, it must be a
+delightful existence.
+
+17th Aug.--Since I wrote last, we got into the south-west monsoon
+for one day, and I sat up by the steersman in intense enjoyment--a
+bright sun and glittering blue sea; and we tore along, pitching and
+tossing the water up like mad.  It was glorious.  At night, I was
+calmly reposing in my cot, in the middle of the steerage, just
+behind the main hatchway, when I heard a crashing of rigging and a
+violent noise and confusion on deck.  The captain screamed out
+orders which informed me that we were in the thick of a collision--
+of course I lay still, and waited till the row, or the ship, went
+down.  I found myself next day looked upon as no better than a
+heathen by all the women, because I had been cool, and declined to
+get up and make a noise.  Presently the officers came and told me
+that a big ship had borne down on us--we were on the starboard
+tack, and all right--carried off our flying jib-boom and whisker
+(the sort of yard to the bowsprit).  The captain says he was never
+in such imminent danger in his life, as she threatened to swing
+round and to crush into our waist, which would have been certain
+destruction.  The little dandy soldier-officer behaved capitally;
+he turned his men up in no time, and had them all ready.  He said,
+'Why, you know, I must see that my fellows go down decently.'  S-
+was as cool as an icicle, offered me my pea-jacket, &c., which I
+declined, as it would be of no use for me to go off in boats, even
+supposing there were time, and I preferred going down comfortably
+in my cot.  Finding she was of no use to me, she took a yelling
+maid in custody, and was thought a brute for begging her to hold
+her noise.  The first lieutenant, who looks on passengers as odious
+cargo, has utterly mollified to me since this adventure.  I heard
+him report to the captain that I was 'among 'em all, and never sung
+out, nor asked a question the while'.  This he called 'beautiful'.
+
+Next day we got light wind S.W. (which ought to be the S.E.
+trades), and the weather has been, beyond all description, lovely
+ever since.  Cool, but soft, sunny and bright--in short, perfect;
+only the sky is so pale.  Last night the sunset was a vision of
+loveliness, a sort of Pompadour paradise; the sky seemed full of
+rose-crowned amorini, and the moon wore a rose-coloured veil of
+bright pink cloud, all so light, so airy, so brilliant, and so
+fleeting, that it was a kind of intoxication.  It is far less grand
+than northern colour, but so lovely, so shiny.  Then the flying
+fish skimmed like silver swallows over the blue water.  Such a
+sight!  Also, I saw a whale spout like a very tiny garden fountain.
+The Southern Cross is a delusion, and the tropical moon no better
+than a Parisian one, at present.  We are now in lat. 31 degrees
+about, and have been driven halfway to Rio by this sweet southern
+breeze.  I have never yet sat on deck without a cloth jacket or
+shawl, and the evenings are chilly.  I no longer believe in
+tropical heat at sea.  Even during the calm it was not so hot as I
+have often felt it in England--and that, under a vertical sun.  The
+ship that nearly ran us and herself down, must have kept no look-
+out, and refused to answer our hail.  She is supposed to be from
+Glasgow by her looks.  We may speak a ship and send letters on
+board; so excuse scrawl and confusion, it is so difficult to write
+at all.
+
+30th August.--About 25 degrees S. lat. and very much to the west.
+We have had all sorts of weather--some beautiful, some very rough,
+but always contrary winds--and got within 200 miles of the coast of
+South America.  We now have a milder breeze from the SOFT N.E.,
+after a BITTER S.W., with Cape pigeons and mollymawks (a small
+albatross), not to compare with our gulls.  We had private
+theatricals last night--ill acted, but beautifully got up as far as
+the sailors were concerned.  I did not act, as I did not feel well
+enough, but I put a bit for Neptune into the Prologue and made the
+boatswain's mate speak it, to make up for the absence of any
+shaving at the Line, which the captain prohibited altogether; I
+thought it hard the men should not get their 'tips'.  The
+boatswain's mate dressed and spoke it admirably; and the old
+carpenter sang a famous comic song, dressed to perfection as a
+ploughboy.
+
+I am disappointed in the tropics as to warmth.  Our thermometer
+stood at 82 degrees one day only, under the vertical sun, N. of the
+Line; ON the Line at 74 degrees; and at sea it FEELS 10 degrees
+colder than it is.  I have never been hot, except for two days 4
+degrees N. of the Line, and now it is very cold, but it is very
+invigorating.  All day long it looks and feels like early morning;
+the sky is pale blue, with light broken clouds; the sea an
+inconceivably pure opaque blue--lapis lazuli, but far brighter.  I
+saw a lovely dolphin three days ago; his body five feet long (some
+said more) is of a FIERY blue-green, and his huge tail golden
+bronze.  I was glad he scorned the bait and escaped the hook; he
+was so beautiful.  This is the sea from which Venus rose in her
+youthful glory.  All is young, fresh, serene, beautiful, and
+cheerful.
+
+We have not seen a sail for weeks.  But the life at sea makes
+amends for anything, to my mind.  I am never tired of the calms,
+and I enjoy a stiff gale like a Mother Carey's chicken, so long as
+I can be on deck or in the captain's cabin.  Between decks it is
+very close and suffocating in rough weather, as all is shut up.  We
+shall be still three weeks before we reach the Cape; and now the
+sun sets with a sudden plunge before six, and the evenings are
+growing too cold again for me to go on deck after dinner.  As long
+as I could, I spent fourteen hours out of the twenty-four in my
+quiet corner by the wheel, basking in the tropical sun.  Never
+again will I believe in the tales of a burning sun; the vertical
+sun just kept me warm--no more.  In two days we shall be bitterly
+cold again.
+
+Immediately after writing the above it began to blow a gale
+(favourable, indeed, but more furious than the captain had ever
+known in these seas),--about lat. 34 degrees S. and long. 25
+degrees.  For three days we ran under close-reefed (four reefs)
+topsails, before a sea.  The gale in the Bay of Biscay was a little
+shaking up in a puddle (a dirty one) compared to that glorious
+South Atlantic in all its majestic fury.  The intense blue waves,
+crowned with fantastic crests of bright emeralds and with the spray
+blowing about like wild dishevelled hair, came after us to swallow
+us up at a mouthful, but took us up on their backs, and hurried us
+along as if our ship were a cork.  Then the gale slackened, and we
+had a dead calm, during which the waves banged us about
+frightfully, and our masts were in much jeopardy.  Then a foul
+wind, S.E., increased into a gale, lasting five days, during which
+orders were given in dumb show, as no one's voice could be heard;
+through it we fought and laboured and dipped under water, and I
+only had my dry corner by the wheel, where the kind pleasant little
+third officer lashed me tight.  It was far more formidable than the
+first gale, but less beautiful; and we made so much lee-way that we
+lost ten days, and only arrived here yesterday.  I recommend a
+fortnight's heavy gale in the South Atlantic as a cure for a blase
+state of mind.  It cannot be described; the sound, the sense of
+being hurled along without the smallest regard to 'this side
+uppermost'; the beauty of the whole scene, and the occasional crack
+and bear-away of sails and spars; the officer trying to 'sing out',
+quite in vain, and the boatswain's whistle scarcely audible.  I
+remained near the wheel every day for as long as I could bear it,
+and was enchanted.
+
+Then the mortal perils of eating, drinking, moving, sitting, lying;
+standing can't be done, even by the sailors, without holding on.
+THE night of the gale, my cot twice touched the beams of the ship
+above me.  I asked the captain if I had dreamt it, but he said it
+was quite possible; he had never seen a ship so completely on her
+beam ends come up all right, masts and yards all sound.
+
+There is a middy about half M-'s size, a very tiny ten-year-older,
+who has been my delight; he is so completely 'the officer and the
+gentleman'.  My maternal entrails turned like old Alvarez, when
+that baby lay out on the very end of the cross-jack yard to reef,
+in the gale; it was quite voluntary, and the other newcomers all
+declined.  I always called him 'Mr. -, sir', and asked his leave
+gravely, or, on occasions, his protection and assistance; and his
+little dignity was lovely.  He is polite to the ladies, and
+slightly distant to the passenger-boys, bigger than himself, whom
+he orders off dangerous places; 'Children, come out of that; you'll
+be overboard.'
+
+A few days before landing I caught a bad cold, and kept my bed.  I
+caught this cold by 'sleeping with a damp man in my cabin', as some
+one said.  During the last gale, the cabin opposite mine was
+utterly swamped, and I found the Irish soldier-servant of a little
+officer of eighteen in despair; the poor lad had got ague, and
+eight inches of water in his bed, and two feet in the cabin.  I
+looked in and said, 'He can't stay there--carry him into my cabin,
+and lay him in the bunk'; which he did, with tears running down his
+honest old face.  So we got the boy into S-'s bed, and cured his
+fever and ague, caught under canvas in Romney Marsh.  Meantime S-
+had to sleep in a chair and to undress in the boy's wet cabin.  As
+a token of gratitude, he sent me a poodle pup, born on board, very
+handsome.  The artillery officers were generally well-behaved; the
+men, deserters and ruffians, sent out as drivers.  We have had five
+courts-martial and two floggings in eight weeks, among seventy men.
+They were pampered with food and porter, and would not pull a rope,
+or get up at six to air their quarters.  The sailors are an
+excellent set of men.  When we parted, the first lieutenant said to
+me, 'Weel, ye've a wonderful idee of discipline for a leddy, I will
+say.  You've never been reported but once, and that was on sick
+leave, for your light, and all in order.'
+
+
+Cape Town, Sept. 18.
+
+
+We anchored yesterday morning, and Captain J-, the Port Captain,
+came off with a most kind letter from Sir Baldwin Walker, his gig,
+and a boat and crew for S- and the baggage.  So I was whipped over
+the ship's side in a chair, and have come to a boarding house where
+the J-s live.  I was tired and dizzy and landsick, and lay down and
+went to sleep.  After an hour or so I woke, hearing a little
+gazouillement, like that of chimney swallows.  On opening my eyes I
+beheld four demons, 'sons of the obedient Jinn', each bearing an
+article of furniture, and holding converse over me in the language
+of Nephelecoecygia.  Why has no one ever mentioned the curious
+little soft voices of these coolies?--you can't hear them with the
+naked ear, three feet off.  The most hideous demon (whose
+complexion had not only the colour, but the precise metallic lustre
+of an ill black-leaded stove) at last chirruped a wish for orders,
+which I gave.  I asked the pert, active, cockney housemaid what I
+ought to pay them, as, being a stranger, they might overcharge me.
+Her scorn was sublime, 'Them nasty blacks never asks more than
+their regular charge.'  So I asked the black-lead demon, who
+demanded 'two shilling each horse in waggon', and a dollar each
+'coolie man'.  He then glided with fiendish noiselessness about the
+room, arranged the furniture to his own taste, and finally said,
+'Poor missus sick'; then more chirruping among themselves, and
+finally a fearful gesture of incantation, accompanied by 'God bless
+poor missus.  Soon well now'.  The wrath of the cockney housemaid
+became majestic:  'There, ma'am; you see how saucy they have grown-
+-a nasty black heathen Mohamedan a blessing of a white Christian!'
+
+These men are the Auvergnats of Africa.  I was assured that bankers
+entrust them with large sums in gold, which they carry some hundred
+and twenty miles, by unknown tracks, for a small gratuity.  The
+pretty, graceful Malays are no honester than ourselves, but are
+excellent workmen.
+
+To-morrow, my linen will go to a ravine in the giant mountain at my
+back, and there be scoured in a clear spring by brown women,
+bleached on the mountain top, and carried back all those long miles
+on their heads, as it went up.
+
+My landlady is Dutch; the waiter is an Africander, half Dutch, half
+Malay, very handsome, and exactly like a French gentleman, and as
+civil.
+
+Enter 'Africander' lad with a nosegay; only one flower that I know-
+-heliotrope.  The vegetation is lovely; the freshness of spring and
+the richness of summer.  The leaves on the trees are in all the
+beauty of spring.  Mrs. R- brought me a plate of oranges, 'just
+gathered', as soon as I entered the house--and, oh! how good they
+were! better even than the Maltese.  They are going out, and DEAR
+now--two a penny, very large and delicious.  I am wild to get out
+and see the glorious scenery and the hideous people.  To-day the
+wind has been a cold south-wester, and I have not been out.  My
+windows look N. and E. so I get all the sun and warmth.  The beauty
+of Table Bay is astounding.  Fancy the Undercliff in the Isle of
+Wight magnified a hundred-fold, with clouds floating halfway up the
+mountain.  The Hottentot mountains in the distance have a fantastic
+jagged outline, which hardly looks real.  The town is like those in
+the south of Europe; flat roofs, and all unfinished; roads are
+simply non-existent.  At the doors sat brown women with black hair
+that shone like metal, very handsome; they are Malays, and their
+men wear conical hats a-top of turbans, and are the chief artisans.
+At the end of the pier sat a Mozambique woman in white drapery and
+the most majestic attitude, like a Roman matron; her features large
+and strong and harsh, but fine; and her skin blacker than night.
+
+I have got a couple of Cape pigeons (the storm-bird of the South
+Atlantic) for J-'s hat.  They followed us several thousand miles,
+and were hooked for their pains.  The albatrosses did not come
+within hail.
+
+The little Maltese goat gave a pint of milk night and morning, and
+was a great comfort to the cow.  She did not like the land or the
+grass at first, and is to be thrown out of milk now.  She is much
+admired and petted by the young Africander.  My room is at least
+eighteen feet high, and contains exactly a bedstead, one straw
+mattrass, one rickety table, one wash-table, two chairs, and broken
+looking-glass; no carpet, and a hiatus of three inches between the
+floor and the door, but all very clean; and excellent food.  I have
+not made a bargain yet, but I dare say I shall stay here.
+
+Friday.--I have just received your letter; where it has been
+hiding, I can't conceive.  To-day is cold and foggy, like a baddish
+day in June with you; no colder, if so cold.  Still, I did not
+venture out, the fog rolls so heavily over the mountain.  Well, I
+must send off this yarn, which is as interminable as the 'sinnet'
+and 'foxes' which I twisted with the mids.
+
+
+
+LETTER II
+
+
+
+Cape Town, Oct. 3.
+
+I came on shore on a very fine day, but the weather changed, and we
+had a fortnight of cold and damp and S.W. wind (equivalent to our
+east wind), such as the 'oldest inhabitant' never experienced; and
+I have had as bad an attack of bronchitis as ever I remember,
+having been in bed till yesterday.  I had a very good doctor, half
+Italian, half Dane, born at the Cape of Good Hope, and educated at
+Edinburgh, named Chiappini.  He has a son studying medicine in
+London, whose mother is Dutch; such is the mixture of bloods here.
+
+Yesterday, the wind went to the south-east; the blessed sun shone
+out, and the weather was lovely at once.  The mountain threw off
+his cloak of cloud, and all was bright and warm.  I got up and sat
+in the verandah over the stoep (a kind of terrace in front of every
+house here).  They brought me a tortoise as big as half a crown and
+as lively as a cricket to look at, and a chameleon like a fairy
+dragon--a green fellow, five inches long, with no claws on his
+feet, but suckers like a fly--the most engaging little beast.  He
+sat on my finger, and caught flies with great delight and
+dexterity, and I longed to send him to M-.  To-day, I went a long
+drive with Captain and Mrs. J-:  we went to Rondebosch and Wynberg-
+-lovely country; rather like Herefordshire; red earth and oak-
+trees.  Miles of the road were like Gainsborough-lane, on a large
+scale, and looked quite English; only here and there a hedge of
+prickly pear, or the big white aruns in the ditches, told a
+different tale; and the scarlet geraniums and myrtles growing wild
+puzzled one.
+
+And then came rattling along a light, rough, but well-poised cart,
+with an Arab screw driven by a Malay, in a great hat on his
+kerchiefed head, and his wife, with her neat dress, glossy black
+hair, and great gold earrings.  They were coming with fish, which
+he had just caught at Kalk Bay, and was going to sell for the
+dinners of the Capetown folk.  You pass neat villas, with pretty
+gardens and stoeps, gay with flowers, and at the doors of several,
+neat Malay girls are lounging.  They are the best servants here,
+for the emigrants mostly drink.  Then you see a group of children
+at play, some as black as coals, some brown and very pretty.  A
+little black girl, about R-'s age, has carefully tied what little
+petticoat she has, in a tight coil round her waist, and displays
+the most darling little round legs and behind, which it would be a
+real pleasure to slap; it is so shiny and round, and she runs and
+stands so strongly and gracefully.
+
+Here comes another Malay, with a pair of baskets hanging from a
+stick across his shoulder, like those in Chinese pictures, which
+his hat also resembles.  Another cart full of working men, with a
+Malay driver; and inside are jumbled some red-haired, rosy-cheeked
+English navvies, with the ugliest Mozambiques, blacker than Erebus,
+and with faces all knobs and corners, like a crusty loaf.  As we
+drive home we see a span of sixteen noble oxen in the marketplace,
+and on the ground squats the Hottentot driver.  His face no words
+can describe--his cheek-bones are up under his hat, and his meagre-
+pointed chin halfway down to his waist; his eyes have the dull look
+of a viper's, and his skin is dirty and sallow, but not darker than
+a dirty European's.
+
+Capetown is rather pretty, but beyond words untidy and out of
+repair.  As it is neither drained nor paved, it won't do in hot
+weather; and I shall migrate 'up country' to a Dutch village.  Mrs.
+J-, who is Dutch herself, tells me that one may board in a Dutch
+farm-house very cheaply, and with great comfort (of course eating
+with the family), and that they will drive you about the country
+and tend your horses for nothing, if you are friendly, and don't
+treat them with Engelsche hoog-moedigheid.
+
+Oct. 19th.--The packet came in last night, but just in time to save
+the fine of 50l. per diem, and I got your welcome letter this
+morning.  I have been coughing all this time, but I hope I shall
+improve.  I came out at the very worst time of year, and the
+weather has been (of course) 'unprecedentedly' bad and changeable.
+But when it IS fine it is quite celestial; so clear, so dry, so
+light.  Then comes a cloud over Table Mountain, like the sugar on a
+wedding-cake, which tumbles down in splendid waterfalls, and
+vanishes unaccountably halfway; and then you run indoors and shut
+doors and windows, or it portends a 'south-easter', i.e. a
+hurricane, and Capetown disappears in impenetrable clouds of dust.
+But this wind coming off the hills and fields of ice, is the Cape
+doctor, and keeps away cholera, fever of every sort, and all
+malignant or infectious diseases.  Most of them are unknown here.
+Never was so healthy a place; but the remedy is of the heroic
+nature, and very disagreeable.  The stones rattle against the
+windows, and omnibuses are blown over on the Rondebosch road.
+
+A few days ago, I drove to Mr. V-'s farm.  Imagine St. George's
+Hill, and the most beautiful bits of it, sloping gently up to Table
+Mountain, with its grey precipices, and intersected with Scotch
+burns, which water it all the year round, as they come from the
+living rock; and sprinkled with oranges, pomegranates, and camelias
+in abundance.  You drive through a mile or two as described, and
+arrive at a square, planted with rows of fine oaks close together;
+at the upper end stands the house, all on the ground-floor, but on
+a high stoep:  rooms eighteen feet high; the old slave quarters on
+each side; stables, &c., opposite; the square as big as Belgrave
+Square, and the buildings in the old French style.
+
+We then went on to Newlands, a still more beautiful place.  Immense
+trenching and draining going on--the foreman a Caffre, black as
+ink, six feet three inches high, and broad in proportion, with a
+staid, dignified air, and Englishmen working under him!  At the
+streamlets there are the inevitable groups of Malay women washing
+clothes, and brown babies sprawling about.  Yesterday, I should
+have bought a black woman for her beauty, had it been still
+possible.  She was carrying an immense weight on her head, and was
+far gone with child; but such stupendous physical perfection I
+never even imagined.  Her jet black face was like the Sphynx, with
+the same mysterious smile; her shape and walk were goddess-like,
+and the lustre of her skin, teeth, and eyes, showed the fulness of
+health;--Caffre of course.  I walked after her as far as her swift
+pace would let me, in envy and admiration of such stately humanity.
+
+The ordinary blacks, or Mozambiques, as they call them, are
+hideous.  Malay here seems equivalent to Mohammedan.  They were
+originally Malays, but now they include every shade, from the
+blackest nigger to the most blooming English woman.  Yes, indeed,
+the emigrant-girls have been known to turn 'Malays', and get
+thereby husbands who know not billiards and brandy--the two
+diseases of Capetown.  They risked a plurality of wives, and
+professed Islam, but they got fine clothes and industrious
+husbands.  They wear a very pretty dress, and all have a great air
+of independence and self-respect; and the real Malays are very
+handsome.  I am going to see one of the Mollahs soon, and to look
+at their schools and mosque; which, to the distraction of the
+Scotch, they call their 'Kerk.'
+
+I asked a Malay if he would drive me in his cart with the six or
+eight mules, which he agreed to do for thirty shillings and his
+dinner (i.e. a share of my dinner) on the road.  When I asked how
+long it would take, he said, 'Allah is groot', which meant, I
+found, that it depended on the state of the beach--the only road
+for half the way.
+
+The sun, moon, and stars are different beings from those we look
+upon.  Not only are they so large and bright, but you SEE that the
+moon and stars are BALLS, and that the sky is endless beyond them.
+On the other hand, the clear, dry air dwarfs Table Mountain, as you
+seem to see every detail of it to the very top.
+
+Capetown is very picturesque.  The old Dutch buildings are very
+handsome and peculiar, but are falling to decay and dirt in the
+hands of their present possessors.  The few Dutch ladies I have
+seen are very pleasing.  They are gentle and simple, and naturally
+well-bred.  Some of the Malay women are very handsome, and the
+little children are darlings.  A little parti-coloured group of
+every shade, from ebony to golden hair and blue eyes, were at play
+in the street yesterday, and the majority were pretty, especially
+the half-castes.  Most of the Caffres I have seen look like the
+perfection of human physical nature, and seem to have no diseases.
+Two days ago I saw a Hottentot girl of seventeen, a housemaid here.
+You would be enchanted by her superfluity of flesh; the face was
+very queer and ugly, and yet pleasing, from the sweet smile and the
+rosy cheeks which please one much, in contrast to all the pale
+yellow faces--handsome as some of them are.
+
+I wish I could send the six chameleons which a good-natured parson
+brought me in his hat, and a queer lizard in his pocket.  The
+chameleons are charming, so monkey-like and so 'caressants'.  They
+sit on my breakfast tray and catch flies, and hang in a bunch by
+their tails, and reach out after my hand.
+
+I have had a very kind letter from Lady Walker, and shall go and
+stay with them at Simon's Bay as soon as I feel up to the twenty-
+two miles along the beaches and bad roads in the mail-cart with
+three horses.  The teams of mules (I beg pardon, spans) would
+delight you--eight, ten, twelve, even sixteen sleek, handsome
+beasts; and oh, such oxen! noble beasts with humps; and hump is
+very good to eat too.
+
+Oct. 21st.--The mail goes out to-morrow, so I must finish this
+letter.  I feel better to-day than I have yet felt, in spite of the
+south-easter.
+
+Yours, &c.
+
+
+
+LETTER III
+
+
+
+28th Oct.--Since I wrote, we have had more really cold weather, but
+yesterday the summer seems to have begun.  The air is as light and
+clear as if THERE WERE NONE, and the sun hot; but I walk in it, and
+do not find it oppressive.  All the household groans and perspires,
+but I am very comfortable.
+
+Yesterday I sat in the full broil for an hour or more, in the hot
+dust of the Malay burial-ground.  They buried the head butcher of
+the Mussulmans, and a most strange poetical scene it was.  The
+burial-ground is on the side of the Lion Mountain--on the Lion's
+rump--and overlooks the whole bay, part of the town, and the most
+superb mountain panorama beyond.  I never saw a view within miles
+of it for beauty and grandeur.  Far down, a fussy English steamer
+came puffing and popping into the deep blue bay, and the 'Hansom's'
+cabs went tearing down to the landing place; and round me sat a
+crowd of grave brown men chanting 'Allah il Allah' to the most
+monotonous but musical air, and with the most perfect voices.  The
+chant seemed to swell, and then fade, like the wind in the trees.
+
+I went in after the procession, which consisted of a bier covered
+with three common Paisley shawls of gay colours; no one looked at
+me; and when they got near the grave, I kept at a distance, and sat
+down when they did.  But a man came up and said, 'You are welcome.'
+So I went close, and saw the whole ceremony.  They took the corpse,
+wrapped in a sheet, out of the bier, and lifted it into the grave,
+where two men received it; then a sheet was held over the grave
+till they had placed the dead man; and then flowers and earth were
+thrown in by all present, the grave filled in, watered out of a
+brass kettle, and decked with flowers.  Then a fat old man, in
+printed calico shirt sleeves, and a plaid waistcoat and corduroy
+trousers, pulled off his shoes, squatted on the grave, and recited
+endless 'Koran', many reciting after him.  Then they chanted
+'Allah-il-Allah' for twenty minutes, I think:  then prayers, with
+'Ameens' and 'Allah il-Allahs' again.  Then all jumped up and
+walked off.  There were eighty or a hundred men, no women, and five
+or six 'Hadjis', draped in beautiful Eastern dresses, and looking
+very supercilious.  The whole party made less noise in moving and
+talking than two Englishmen.
+
+A white-complexioned man spoke to me in excellent English (which
+few of them speak), and was very communicative and civil.  He told
+me the dead man was his brother-in-law, and he himself the barber.
+I hoped I had not taken a liberty.  'Oh, no; poor Malays were proud
+when noble English persons showed such respect to their religion.
+The young Prince had done so too, and Allah would not forget to
+protect him.  He also did not laugh at their prayers, praise be to
+God!'  I had already heard that Prince Alfred is quite the darling
+of the Malays.  He insisted on accepting their fete, which the
+Capetown people had snubbed.  I have a friendship with one Abdul
+Jemaalee and his wife Betsy, a couple of old folks who were slaves
+to Dutch owners, and now keep a fruit-shop of a rough sort, with
+'Betsy, fruiterer,' painted on the back of an old tin tray, and
+hung up by the door of the house.  Abdul first bought himself, and
+then his wife Betsy, whose 'missus' generously threw in her bed-
+ridden mother.  He is a fine handsome old man, and has confided to
+me that 5,000 pounds would not buy what he is worth now.  I have
+also read the letters written by his, son, young Abdul Rachman, now
+a student at Cairo, who has been away five years--four at Mecca.
+The young theologian writes to his 'hoog eerbare moeder' a fond
+request for money, and promises to return soon.  I am invited to
+the feast wherewith he will be welcomed.  Old Abdul Jemaalee thinks
+it will divert my mind, and prove to me that Allah will take me
+home safe to my children, about whom he and his wife asked many
+questions.  Moreover, he compelled me to drink herb tea, compounded
+by a Malay doctor for my cough.  I declined at first, and the poor
+old man looked hurt, gravely assured me that it was not true that
+Malays always poisoned Christians, and drank some himself.
+Thereupon I was obliged, of course, to drink up the rest; it
+certainly did me good, and I have drunk it since with good effect;
+it is intensely bitter and rather sticky.  The white servants and
+the Dutch landlady where I lodge shake their heads ominously, and
+hope it mayn't poison me a year hence.  'Them nasty Malays can make
+it work months after you take it.'  They also possess the evil eye,
+and a talent for love potions.  As the men are very handsome and
+neat, I incline to believe that part of it.
+
+Rathfelder's Halfway House, 6th November.--I drove out here
+yesterday in Captain T-'s drag, which he kindly brought into
+Capetown for me.  He and his wife and children came for a change of
+air for whooping cough, and advised me to come too, as my cough
+continues, though less troublesome.  It is a lovely spot, six miles
+from Constantia, ten from Capetown, and twelve from Simon's Bay.  I
+intend to stay here a little while, and then to go to Kalk Bay, six
+miles from hence.  This inn was excellent, I hear, 'in the old
+Dutch times'.  Now it is kept by a young Englishman, Cape-born, and
+his wife, and is dirty and disorderly.  I pay twelve shillings a
+day for S- and self, without a sitting-room, and my bed is a straw
+paillasse; but the food is plentiful, and not very bad.  That is
+the cheapest rate of living possible here, and every trifle costs
+double what it would in England, except wine, which is very fair at
+fivepence a bottle--a kind of hock.  The landlord pays 1 pound a
+day rent for this house, which is the great resort of the Capetown
+people for Sundays, and for change of air, &c.--a rude kind of
+Richmond.  His cook gets 3 pounds 10s. a month, besides food for
+himself and wife, and beer and sugar.  The two (white) housemaids
+get 1 pound 15s. and 1 pound 10s. respectively (everything by the
+month).  Fresh butter is 3s. 6d. a pound, mutton 7d.; washing very
+dear; cabbages my host sells at 3d. a piece, and pumpkins 8d.  He
+has a fine garden, and pays a gardener 3s. 6d. a day, and black
+labourers 2s.  THEY work three days a week; then they buy rice and
+a coarse fish, and lie in the sun till it is eaten; while their
+darling little fat black babies play in the dust, and their black
+wives make battues in the covers in their woolly heads.  But the
+little black girl who cleans my room is far the best servant, and
+smiles and speaks like Lalage herself, ugly as the poor drudge is.
+The voice and smile of the negroes here is bewitching, though they
+are hideous; and neither S- nor I have yet heard a black child cry,
+or seen one naughty or quarrelsome.  You would want to lay out a
+fortune in woolly babies.  Yesterday I had a dreadful heartache
+after my darling, on her little birthday, and even the lovely
+ranges of distant mountains, coloured like opals in the sunset, did
+not delight me.  This is a dreary place for strangers.  Abdul
+Jemaalee's tisanne, and a banana which he gave me each time I went
+to his shop, are the sole offer of 'Won't you take something?' or
+even the sole attempt at a civility that I have received, except
+from the J-s, who, are very civil and kind.
+
+When I have done my visit to Simon's Bay, I will go 'up country',
+to Stellenbosch, Paarl and Worcester, perhaps.  If I can find
+people going in a bullock-waggon, I will join them; it costs 1
+pound a day, and goes twenty miles.  If money were no object, I
+would hire one with Caffres to hunt, as well as outspan and drive,
+and take a saddle-horse.  There is plenty of pleasure to be had in
+travelling here, if you can afford it.  The scenery is quite beyond
+anything you can imagine in beauty.  I went to a country house at
+Rondebosch with the J-s, and I never saw so lovely a spot.  The
+possessor had done his best to spoil it, and to destroy the
+handsome Dutch house and fountains and aqueducts; but Nature was
+too much for him, and the place lovely in neglect and shabbiness.
+
+Now I will tell you my impressions of the state of society here, as
+far as I have been able to make out by playing the inquisitive
+traveller.  I dare say the statements are exaggerated, but I do not
+think they are wholly devoid of truth.  The Dutch round Capetown (I
+don't know anything of 'up country') are sulky and dispirited; they
+regret the slave days, and can't bear to pay wages; they have sold
+all their fine houses in town to merchants, &c., and let their
+handsome country places go to pieces, and their land lie fallow,
+rather than hire the men they used to own.  They hate the Malays,
+who were their slaves, and whose 'insolent prosperity' annoys them,
+and they don't like the vulgar, bustling English.  The English
+complain that the Dutch won't die, and that they are the curse of
+the colony (a statement for which they can never give a reason).
+But they, too, curse the emancipation, long to flog the niggers,
+and hate the Malays, who work harder and don't drink, and who are
+the only masons, tailors, &c., and earn from 4s. 6d. to 10s. a day.
+The Malays also have almost a monopoly of cart-hiring and horse-
+keeping; an Englishman charges 4 pounds 10s. or 5 pounds for a
+carriage to do what a Malay will do quicker in a light cart for
+30s.  S- says, 'The English here think the coloured people ought to
+do the work, and they to get the wages.  Nothing less would satisfy
+them.'  Servants' wages are high, but other wages not much higher
+than in England; yet industrious people invariably make fortunes,
+or at least competencies, even when they begin with nothing.  But
+few of the English will do anything but lounge; while they abuse
+the Dutch as lazy, and the Malays as thieves, and feel their
+fingers itch to be at the blacks.  The Africanders (Dutch and negro
+mixed in various proportions) are more or less lazy, dirty, and
+dressy, and the beautiful girls wear pork-pie hats, and look very
+winning and rather fierce; but to them the philanthropists at home
+have provided formidable rivals, by emptying a shipload of young
+ladies from a 'Reformatory' into the streets of Capetown.
+
+I am puzzled what to think of the climate here for invalids.  The
+air is dry and clear beyond conception, and light, but the sun is
+scorching; while the south-east wind blows an icy hurricane, and
+the dust obscures the sky.  These winds last all the summer, till
+February or March.  I am told when they don't blow it is heavenly,
+though still cold in the mornings and evenings.  No one must be out
+at, or after sunset, the chill is so sudden.  Many of the people
+here declare that it is death to weak lungs, and send their
+poitrinaires to Madeira, or the south of France.  They also swear
+the climate is enervating, but their looks, and above all the
+blowsy cheeks and hearty play of the English children, disprove
+that; and those who come here consumptive get well in spite of the
+doctors, who won't allow it possible.  I believe it is a climate
+which requires great care from invalids, but that, with care, it is
+good, because it is bracing as well as warm and dry.  It is not
+nearly so warm as I expected; the southern icebergs are at no great
+distance, and they ice the south-east wind for us.  If it were not
+so violent, it would be delicious; and there are no unhealthy
+winds--nothing like our east wind.  The people here grumble at the
+north-wester, which sometimes brings rain, and call it damp, which,
+as they don't know what damp is, is excusable; it feels like a DRY
+south-wester in England.  It is, however, quite a delusion to think
+of living out of doors, here; the south-easters keep one in nearly,
+if not quite, half one's time, and in summer they say the sun is
+too hot to be out except morning and evening.  But I doubt that,
+for they make an outcry about heat as soon as it is not cold.  The
+transitions are so sudden, that, with the thermometer at 76
+degrees, you must not go out without taking a thick warm cloak; you
+may walk into a south-easter round the first spur of the mountain,
+and be cut in two.  In short, the air is cold and bracing, and the
+sun blazing hot; those whom that suits, will do well.  I should
+like a softer air, but I may be wrong; when there is only a
+moderate wind, it is delicious.  You walk in the hot sun, which
+makes you perspire a very little; but you dry as you go, the air is
+so dry; and you come in untired.  I speak of slow walking.  There
+are no hot-climate diseases; no dysentery, fever, &c.
+
+Simon's Bay, 18th Nov.--I came on here in a cart, as I felt ill
+from the return of the cold weather.  While at Rathfelder we had a
+superb day, and the J-s drove me over to Constantia, which deserves
+all its reputation for beauty.  What a divine spot!--such kloofs,
+with silver rills running down them!  It is useless to describe
+scenery.  It was a sort of glorified Scotland, with sunshine,
+flowers, and orange-groves.  We got home hungry and tired, but in
+great spirits.  Alas! next day came the south-easter--blacker,
+colder, more cutting, than ever--and lasted a week.
+
+The Walkers came over on horseback, and pressed me to go to them.
+They are most kind and agreeable people.  The drive to Simon's Bay
+was lovely, along the coast and across five beaches of snow-white
+sand, which look like winter landscapes; and the mountains and bay
+are lovely.
+
+Living is very dear, and washing, travelling, chemist's bills--all
+enormous.  Thirty shillings a cart and horse from Rathfelder here--
+twelve miles; and then the young English host wanted me to hire
+another cart for one box and one bath!  But I would not, and my
+obstinacy was stoutest.  If I want cart or waggon again, I'll deal
+with a Malay, only the fellows drive with forty Jehu-power up and
+down the mountains.
+
+A Madagascar woman offered to give me her orphan grandchild, a
+sweet brown fairy, six years old, with long silky black hair, and
+gorgeous eyes.  The child hung about me incessantly all the time I
+was at Rathfelder, and I had a great mind to her.  She used to
+laugh like baby, and was like her altogether, only prettier, and
+very brown; and when I told her she was like my own little child,
+she danced about, and laughed like mad at the idea that she could
+look like 'pretty white Missy'.  She was mighty proud of her
+needlework and A B C performances.
+
+It is such a luxury to sleep on a real mattrass--not stuffed with
+dirty straw; to eat clean food, and live in a nice room.  But my
+cough is very bad, and the cruel wind blows on and on.  I saw the
+doctor of the Naval Hospital here to-day.  If I don't mend, I will
+try his advice, and go northward for warmth.  If you can find an
+old Mulready envelope, send it here to Miss Walker, who collects
+stamps and has not got it, and write and thank dear good Lady
+Walker for her kindness to me.
+
+You will get this about the new year.  God bless you all, and send
+us better days in 1862.
+
+
+
+LETTER IV--JOURNEY TO CALEDON
+
+
+
+Caledon, Dec. 10th.
+
+I did not feel at all well at Simon's Bay, which is a land of
+hurricanes.  We had a 'south-easter' for fourteen days, without an
+hour's lull; even the flag-ship had no communication with the shore
+for eight days.  The good old naval surgeon there ordered me to
+start off for this high 'up-country' district, and arranged my
+departure for the first POSSIBLE day.  He made a bargain for me
+with a Dutchman, for a light Malay cart (a capital vehicle with two
+wheels) and four horses, for 30s. a day--three days to Caledon from
+Simon's Bay, about a hundred miles or so, and one day of back fare
+to his home in Capetown.
+
+Luckily, on Saturday the wind dropped, and we started at nine
+o'clock, drove to a place about four miles from Capetown, when we
+turned off on the 'country road', and outspanned at a post-house
+kept by a nice old German with a Dutch wife.  Once well out of
+Capetown, people are civil, but inquisitive; I was strictly cross-
+questioned, and proved so satisfactory, that the old man wished to
+give me some English porter gratis.  We then jogged along again at
+a very good pace to another wayside public, where we outspanned
+again and ate, and were again questioned, and again made much of.
+By six o'clock we got to the Eerste River, having gone forty miles
+or so in the day.  It was a beautiful day, and very pleasant
+travelling.  We had three good little half-Arab bays, and one brute
+of a grey as off-wheeler, who fell down continually; but a Malay
+driver works miracles, and no harm came of it.  The cart is small,
+with a permanent tilt at top, and moveable curtains of waterproof
+all round; harness of raw leather, very prettily put together by
+Malay workmen.  We sat behind, and our brown coachman, with his
+mushroom hat, in front, with my bath and box, and a miniature of
+himself about seven years old--a nephew,--so small and handy that
+he would be worth his weight in jewels as a tiger.  At Eerste River
+we slept in a pretty old Dutch house, kept by an English woman, and
+called the Fox and Hound, 'to sound like home, my lady.'  Very nice
+and comfortable it was.
+
+I started next day at ten; and never shall I forget that day's
+journey.  The beauty of the country exceeds all description.
+Ranges of mountains beyond belief fantastic in shape, and between
+them a rolling country, desolate and wild, and covered with
+gorgeous flowers among the 'scrub'.  First we came to Hottentot's
+Holland (now called Somerset West), the loveliest little old Dutch
+village, with trees and little canals of bright clear mountain
+water, and groves of orange and pomegranate, and white houses, with
+incredible gable ends.  We tried to stop here; but forage was
+ninepence a bundle, and the true Malay would rather die than pay
+more than he can help.  So we pushed on to the foot of the
+mountains, and bought forage (forage is oats au natural, straw and
+all, the only feed known here, where there is no grass or hay) at a
+farm kept by English people, who all talked Dutch together; only
+one girl of the family could speak English.  They were very civil,
+asked us in, and gave us unripe apricots, and the girl came down
+with seven flounces, to talk with us.  Forage was still ninepence--
+half a dollar a bundle--and Choslullah Jaamee groaned over it, and
+said the horses must have less forage and 'more plenty roll' (a
+roll in the dust is often the only refreshment offered to the
+beasts, and seems to do great good).
+
+We got to Caledon at eleven, and drove to the place the Doctor
+recommended--formerly a country house of the Dutch Governor.  It is
+in a lovely spot; but do you remember the Schloss in Immermann's
+Neuer Munchausen?  Well, it is that.  A ruin;--windows half broken
+and boarded up, the handsome steps in front fallen in, and all en
+suite.  The rooms I saw were large and airy; but mud floors, white-
+washed walls, one chair, one stump bedstead, and praeterea nihil.
+It has a sort of wild, romantic look; I hear, too, it is
+wonderfully healthy, and not so bad as it looks.  The long corridor
+is like the entrance to a great stable, or some such thing; earth
+floors and open to all winds.  But you can't imagine it, however I
+may describe; it is so huge and strange, and ruinous.  Finding that
+the mistress of the house was ill, and nothing ready for our
+reception, I drove on to the inn.  Rain, like a Scotch mist, came
+on just as we arrived, and it is damp and chilly, to the delight of
+all the dwellers in the land, who love bad weather.  It makes me
+cough a little more; but they say it is quite unheard of, and can't
+last.  Altogether, I suppose this summer here is as that of '60 was
+in England.
+
+I forgot, in describing my journey, the regal-looking Caffre
+housemaid at Eerste River.  'Such a dear, good creature,' the
+landlady said; and, oh, such a 'noble savage'!--with a cotton
+handkerchief folded tight like a cravat and tied round her head
+with a bow behind, and the short curly wool sticking up in the
+middle;--it looked like a royal diadem on her solemn brow; she
+stepped like Juno, with a huge tub full to the brim, and holding
+several pailfuls, on her head, and a pailful in each hand, bringing
+water for the stables from the river, across a large field.  There
+is nothing like a Caffre for power and grace; and the face, though
+very African, has a sort of grandeur which makes it utterly unlike
+that of the negro.  That woman's bust and waist were beauty itself.
+The Caffres are also very clean and very clever as servants, I
+hear, learning cookery, &c., in a wonderfully short time.  When
+they have saved money enough to buy cattle in Kaffraria, off they
+go, cast aside civilization and clothes, and enjoy life in naked
+luxury.
+
+I can't tell you how I longed for you in my journey.  You would
+have been so delighted with the country and the queer turn-out--the
+wild little horses, and the polite and delicately-clean Moslem
+driver.  His description of his sufferings from 'louses', when he
+slept in a Dutch farm, were pathetic, and ever since, he sleeps in
+his cart, with the little boy; and they bathe in the nearest river,
+and eat their lawful food and drink their water out of doors.  They
+declined beer, or meat which had been unlawfully killed.  In
+Capetown ALL meat is killed by Malays, and has the proper prayer
+spoken over it, and they will eat no other.  I was offered a fowl
+at a farm, but Choslullah thought it 'too much money for Missus',
+and only accepted some eggs.  He was gratified at my recognising
+the propriety of his saying 'Bismillah' over any animal killed for
+food.  Some drink beer, and drink a good deal, but Choslullah
+thought it 'very wrong for Malay people, and not good for Christian
+people, to be drunk beasties;--little wine or beer good for
+Christians, but not too plenty much.'  I gave him ten shillings for
+himself, at which he was enchanted, and again begged me to write to
+his master for him when I wanted to leave Caledon, and to be sure
+to say, 'Mind send same coachman.'  He planned to drive me back
+through Worcester, Burnt Vley, Paarl, and Stellenbosch--a longer
+round; but he could do it in three days well, so as 'not cost
+Missus more money', and see a different country.
+
+This place is curiously like Rochefort in the Ardennes, only the
+hills are mountains, and the sun is far hotter; not so the air,
+which is fresh and pleasant.  I am in a very nice inn, kept by an
+English ex-officer, who went through the Caffre war, and found his
+pay insufficient for the wants of a numerous family.  I quite
+admire his wife, who cooks, cleans, nurses her babes, gives singing
+and music lessons,--all as merrily as if she liked it.  I dine with
+them at two o'clock, and Captain D- has a table d'hote at seven for
+travellers.  I pay only 10s. 6d. a day for myself and S-; this
+includes all but wine or beer.  The air is very clear and fine, and
+my cough is already much better.  I shall stay here as long as it
+suits me and does me good, and then I am to send for Choslullah
+again, and go back by the road he proposed.  It rains here now and
+then, and blows a good deal, but the wind has lost its bitter
+chill, and depressing quality.  I hope soon to ride a little and
+see the country, which is beautiful.
+
+The water-line is all red from the iron stone, and there are hot
+chalybeate springs up the mountain which are very good for
+rheumatism, and very strengthening, I am told.  The boots here is a
+Mantatee, very black, and called Kleenboy, because he is so little;
+he is the only sleek black I have seen here, but looks heavy and
+downcast.  One maid is Irish (they make the best servants here), a
+very nice clean girl, and the other, a brown girl of fifteen, whose
+father is English, and married to her mother.  Food here is scarce,
+all but bread and mutton, both good.  Butter is 3s. a pound; fruit
+and vegetables only to be had by chance.  I miss the oranges and
+lemons sadly.  Poultry and milk uncertain.  The bread is good
+everywhere, from the fine wheat:  in the country it is brownish and
+sweet.  The wine here is execrable; this is owing to the prevailing
+indolence, for there is excellent wine made from the Rhenish grape,
+rather like Sauterne, with a soupcon of Manzanilla flavour.  The
+sweet Constantia is also very good indeed; not the expensive sort,
+which is made from grapes half dried, and is a liqueur, but a
+light, sweet, straw-coloured wine, which even I liked.  We drank
+nothing else at the Admiral's.  The kind old sailor has given me a
+dozen of wine, which is coming up here in a waggon, and will be
+most welcome.  I can't tell you how kind he and Lady Walker were; I
+was there three weeks, and hope to go again when the south-easter
+season is over and I can get out a little.  I could not leave the
+house at all; and even Lady Walker and the girls, who are very
+energetic, got out but little.  They are a charming family.
+
+I have no doubt that Dr. Shea was right, and that one must leave
+the coast to get a fine climate.  Here it seems to me nearly
+perfect--too windy for my pleasure, but then the sun would be
+overpowering without a fresh breeze.  Every one agrees in saying
+that the winter in Capetown is delicious--like a fine English
+summer.  In November the southeasters begin, and they are
+'fiendish'; this year they began in September.  The mornings here
+are always fresh, not to say cold; the afternoons, from one to
+three, broiling; then delightful till sunset, which is deadly cold
+for three-quarters of an hour; the night is lovely.  The wind rises
+and falls with the sun.  That is the general course of things.  Now
+and then it rains, and this year there is a little south-easter,
+which is quite unusual, and not odious, as it is near the sea; and
+there is seldom a hot wind from the north.  I am promised that on
+or about Christmas-day; then doors and windows are shut, and you
+gasp.  Hitherto we have had nothing nearly so hot as Paris in
+summer, or as the summer of 1859 in England; and they say it is no
+hotter, except when the hot wind blows, which is very rare.  Up
+here, snow sometimes lies, in winter, on the mountain tops; but ice
+is unknown, and Table Mountain is never covered with snow.  The
+flies are pestilent--incredibly noisy, intrusive, and disgusting--
+and oh, such swarms!  Fleas and bugs not half so bad as in France,
+as far as my experience goes, and I have poked about in queer
+places.
+
+I get up at half-past five, and walk in the early morning, before
+the sun and wind begin to be oppressive; it is then dry, calm, and
+beautiful; then I sleep like a Dutchman in the middle of the day.
+At present it tires me, but I shall get used to it soon.  The Dutch
+doctor here advised me to do so, to avoid the wind.
+
+When all was settled, we climbed the Hottentot's mountains by Sir
+Lowry's Pass, a long curve round two hill-sides; and what a view!
+Simon's Bay opening out far below, and range upon range of crags on
+one side, with a wide fertile plain, in which lies Hottentot's
+Holland, at one's feet.  The road is just wide enough for one
+waggon, i.e. very narrow.  Where the smooth rock came through,
+Choslullah gave a little grunt, and the three bays went off like
+hippogriffs, dragging the grey with them.  By this time my
+confidence in his driving was boundless, or I should have expected
+to find myself in atoms at the bottom of the precipice.  At the top
+of the pass we turned a sharp corner into a scene like the crater
+of a volcano, only reaching miles away all round; and we descended
+a very little and drove on along great rolling waves of country,
+with the mountain tops, all crags and ruins, to our left.  At three
+we reached Palmiet River, full of palmettos and bamboos, and there
+the horses had 'a little roll', and Choslullah and his miniature
+washed in the river and prayed, and ate dry bread, and drank their
+tepid water out of a bottle with great good breeding and
+cheerfulness.  Three bullock-waggons had outspanned, and the Dutch
+boers and Bastaards (half Hottentots) were all drunk.  We went into
+a neat little 'public', and had porter and ham sandwiches, for
+which I paid 4s. 6d. to a miserable-looking English woman, who was
+afraid of her tipsy customers.  We got to Houw Hoek, a pretty
+valley at the entrance of a mountain gorge, about half-past five,
+and drove up to a mud cottage, half inn, half farm, kept by a
+German and his wife.  It looked mighty queer, but Choslullah said
+the host was a good old man, and all clean.  So we cheered up, and
+asked for food.  While the neat old woman was cooking it, up
+galloped five fine lads and two pretty flaxen-haired girls, with
+real German faces, on wild little horses; and one girl tucked up
+her habit, and waited at table, while another waved a green bough
+to drive off the swarms of flies.  The chops were excellent, ditto
+bread and butter, and the tea tolerable.  The parlour was a tiny
+room with a mud floor, half-hatch door into the front, and the two
+bedrooms still tinier and darker, each with two huge beds which
+filled them entirely.  But Choslullah was right; they were
+perfectly clean, with heaps of beautiful pillows; and not only none
+of the creatures of which he spoke with infinite terror, but even
+no fleas.  The man was delighted to talk to me.  His wife had
+almost forgotten German, and the children did not know a word of
+it, but spoke Dutch and English.  A fine, healthy, happy family.
+It was a pretty picture of emigrant life.  Cattle, pigs, sheep, and
+poultry, and pigeons innumerable, all picked up their own living,
+and cost nothing; and vegetables and fruit grow in rank abundance
+where there is water.  I asked for a book in the evening, and the
+man gave me a volume of Schiller.  A good breakfast,--and we paid
+ninepence for all.
+
+This morning we started before eight, as it looked gloomy, and came
+through a superb mountain defile, out on to a rich hillocky
+country, covered with miles of corn, all being cut as far as the
+eye could reach, and we passed several circular threshing-floors,
+where the horses tread out the grain.  Each had a few mud hovels
+near it, for the farmers and men to live in during harvest.
+Altogether, I was most lucky, had two beautiful days, and enjoyed
+the journey immensely.  It was most 'abentheuerlich'; the light
+two-wheeled cart, with four wild little horses, and the marvellous
+brown driver, who seemed to be always going to perdition, but made
+the horses do apparently impossible things with absolute certainty;
+and the pretty tiny boy who came to help his uncle, and was so
+clever, and so preternaturally quiet, and so very small:  then the
+road through the mountain passes, seven or eight feet wide, with a
+precipice above and below, up which the little horses scrambled;
+while big lizards, with green heads and chocolate bodies, looked
+pertly at us, and a big bright amber-coloured cobra, as handsome as
+he is deadly, wriggled across into a hole.
+
+Nearly all the people in this village are Dutch.  There is one
+Malay tailor here, but he is obliged to be a Christian at Caledon,
+though Choslullah told me with a grin, he was a very good Malay
+when he went to Capetown.  He did not seem much shocked at this
+double religion, staunch Mussulman as he was himself.  I suppose
+the blacks 'up country' are what Dutch slavery made them--mere
+animals--cunning and sulky.  The real Hottentot is extinct, I
+believe, in the Colony; what one now sees are all 'Bastaards', the
+Dutch name for their own descendants by Hottentot women.  These
+mongrel Hottentots, who do all the work, are an affliction to
+behold--debased and SHRIVELLED with drink, and drunk all day long;
+sullen wretched creatures--so unlike the bright Malays and cheery
+pleasant blacks and browns of Capetown, who never pass you without
+a kind word and sunny smile or broad African grin, SELON their
+colour and shape of face.  I look back fondly to the gracious soft-
+looking Malagasse woman who used to give me a chair under the big
+tree near Rathfelders, and a cup of 'bosjesthee' (herb tea), and
+talk so prettily in her soft voice;--it is such a contrast to these
+poor animals, who glower at one quite unpleasantly.  All the hovels
+I was in at Capetown were very fairly clean, and I went into
+numbers.  They almost all contained a handsome bed, with, at least,
+eight pillows.  If you only look at the door with a friendly
+glance, you are implored to come in and sit down, and usually
+offered a 'coppj' (cup) of herb tea, which they are quite grateful
+to one for drinking.  I never saw or heard a hint of 'backsheesh',
+nor did I ever give it, on principle and I was always recognised
+and invited to come again with the greatest eagerness.  'An
+indulgence of talk' from an English 'Missis' seemed the height of
+gratification, and the pride and pleasure of giving hospitality a
+sufficient reward.  But here it is quite different.  I suppose the
+benefits of the emancipation were felt at Capetown sooner than in
+the country, and the Malay population there furnishes a strong
+element of sobriety and respectability, which sets an example to
+the other coloured people.
+
+Harvest is now going on, and the so-called Hottentots are earning
+2s. 6d. a day, with rations and wine.  But all the money goes at
+the 'canteen' in drink, and the poor wretched men and women look
+wasted and degraded.  The children are pretty, and a few of them
+are half-breed girls, who do very well, unless a white man admires
+them; and then they think it quite an honour to have a whitey-brown
+child, which happens at about fifteen, by which age they look full
+twenty.
+
+We had very good snipe and wild duck the other day, which Capt. D-
+brought home from a shooting party.  I have got the moth-like wings
+of a golden snipe for R-'s hat, and those of a beautiful moor-hen.
+They got no 'boks', because of the violent south-easter which blew
+where they were.  The game is fast decreasing, but still very
+abundant.  I saw plenty of partridges on the road, but was not
+early enough to see boks, who only show at dawn; neither have I
+seen baboons.  I will try to bring home some cages of birds--Cape
+canaries and 'roode bekjes' (red bills), darling little things.
+The sugar-birds, which are the humming-birds of Africa, could not
+be fed; but Caffre finks, which weave the pendent nests, are hardy
+and easily fed.
+
+To-day the post for England leaves Caledon, so I must conclude this
+yarn.  I wish R- could have seen the 'klip springer', the mountain
+deer of South Africa, which Capt. D- brought in to show me.  Such a
+lovely little beast, as big as a small kid, with eyes and ears like
+a hare, and a nose so small and dainty.  It was quite tame and
+saucy, and belonged to some man en route for Capetown.
+
+
+
+LETTER V--CALEDON
+
+
+
+Caledon, Dec. 29th.
+
+I am beginning now really to feel better:  I think my cough is
+less, and I eat a great deal more.  They cook nice clean food here,
+and have some good claret, which I have been extravagant enough to
+drink, much to my advantage.  The Cape wine is all so fiery.  The
+climate is improving too.  The glorious African sun blazes and
+roasts one, and the cool fresh breezes prevent one from feeling
+languid.  I walk from six till eight or nine, breakfast at ten, and
+dine at three; in the afternoon it is generally practicable to
+saunter again, now the weather is warmer.  I sleep from twelve till
+two.  On Christmas-eve it was so warm that I lay in bed with the
+window wide open, and the stars blazing in.  Such stars! they are
+much brighter than our moon.  The Dutchmen held high jinks in the
+hall, and danced and made a great noise.  On New Year's-eve they
+will have another ball, and I shall look in.  Christmas-day was the
+hottest day--indeed, the only HOT day we have had--and I could not
+make it out at all, or fancy you all cold at home.
+
+I wish you were here to see the curious ways and new aspect of
+everything.  This village, which, as I have said, is very like
+Rochefort, but hardly so large, is the chef lieu of a district the
+size of one-third of England.  A civil commander resides here, a
+sort of prefet; and there is an embryo market-place, with a bell
+hanging in a brick arch.  When a waggon arrives with goods, it
+draws up there, they ring the bell, everybody goes to see what is
+for sale, and the goods are sold by auction.  My host bought
+potatoes and brandy the other day, and is looking out for ostrich
+feathers for me, out of the men's hats.
+
+The other day, while we sat at dinner, all the bells began to ring
+furiously, and Capt. D- jumped up and shouted 'Brand!' (fire),
+rushed off for a stout leather hat, and ran down the street.  Out
+came all the population, black, white, and brown, awfully excited,
+for it was blowing a furious north-wester, right up the town, and
+the fire was at the bottom; and as every house is thatched with a
+dry brown thatch, we might all have to turn out and see the place
+in ashes in less than an hour.  Luckily, it was put out directly.
+It is supposed to have been set on fire by a Hottentot girl, who
+has done the same thing once before, on being scolded.  There is no
+water but what runs down the streets in the sloot, a paved channel,
+which brings the water from the mountain and supplies the houses
+and gardens.  A garden is impossible without irrigation, of course,
+as it never rains; but with it, you may have everything, all the
+year round.  The people, however, are too careless to grow fruit
+and vegetables.
+
+How the cattle live is a standing marvel to me.  The whole veld
+(common), which extends all over the country (just dotted with a
+few square miles of corn here and there), is covered with a low
+thin scrub, about eighteen inches high, called rhenoster-bosch--
+looking like meagre arbor vitae or pale juniper.  The cattle and
+sheep will not touch this nor the juicy Hottentot fig; but under
+each little bush, I fancy, they crop a few blades of grass, and on
+this they keep in very good condition.  The noble oxen, with their
+huge horns (nine or ten feet from tip to tip), are never fed,
+though they work hard, nor are the sheep.  The horses get a little
+forage (oats, straw and all).  I should like you to see eight or
+ten of these swift wiry little horses harnessed to a waggon,--a
+mere flat platform on wheels.  In front stands a wild-looking
+Hottentot, all patches and feathers, and drives them best pace, all
+'in hand', using a whip like a fishing-rod, with which he touches
+them, not savagely, but with a skill which would make an old stage-
+coachman burst with envy to behold.  This morning, out on the veld,
+I watched the process of breaking-in a couple of colts, who were
+harnessed, after many struggles, second and fourth in a team of
+ten.  In front stood a tiny foal cuddling its mother, one of the
+leaders.  When they started, the foal had its neck through the
+bridle, and I hallooed in a fright; but the Hottentot only laughed,
+and in a minute it had disengaged itself quite coolly and capered
+alongside.  The colts tried to plunge, but were whisked along, and
+couldn't, and then they stuck out all four feet and SKIDDED along a
+bit; but the rhenoster bushes tripped them up (people drive
+regardless of roads), and they shook their heads and trotted along
+quite subdued, without a blow or a word, for the drivers never
+speak to the horses, only to the oxen.  Colts here get no other
+breaking, and therefore have no paces or action to the eye, but
+their speed and endurance are wonderful.  There is no such thing as
+a cock-tail in the country, and the waggon teams of wiry little
+thoroughbreds, half Arab, look very strange to our eyes, going full
+tilt.  There is a terrible murrain, called the lung-sickness, among
+horses and oxen here, every four or five years, but it never
+touches those that are stabled, however exposed to wet or wind on
+the roads.
+
+I must describe the house I inhabit, as all are much alike.  It is
+whitewashed, with a door in the middle and two windows on each
+side; those on the left are Mrs. D-'s bed and sitting rooms.  On
+the right is a large room, which is mine; in the middle of the
+house is a spacious hall, with doors into other rooms on each side,
+and into the kitchen, &c.  There is a yard behind, and a staircase
+up to the zolder or loft, under the thatch, with partitions, where
+the servants and children, and sometimes guests, sleep.  There are
+no ceilings; the floor of the zolder is made of yellow wood, and,
+resting on beams, forms the ceiling of my room, and the thatch
+alone covers that.  No moss ever grows on the thatch, which is
+brown, with white ridges.  In front is a stoep, with 'blue gums'
+(Australian gum-trees) in front of it, where I sit till twelve,
+when the sun comes on it.  These trees prevail here greatly, as
+they want neither water nor anything else, and grow with incredible
+rapidity.
+
+We have got a new 'boy' (all coloured servants are 'boys,'--a
+remnant of slavery), and he is the type of the nigger slave.  A
+thief, a liar, a glutton, a drunkard--but you can't resent it; he
+has a naif, half-foolish, half-knavish buffoonery, a total want of
+self-respect, which disarms you.  I sent him to the post to inquire
+for letters, and the postmaster had been tipsy over-night and was
+not awake.  Jack came back spluttering threats against 'dat domned
+Dutchman.  Me no WANT (like) him; me go and kick up dom'd row.
+What for he no give Missis letter?' &c.  I begged him to be
+patient; on which he bonneted himself in a violent way, and started
+off at a pantomime walk.  Jack is the product of slavery:  he
+pretends to be a simpleton in order to do less work and eat and
+drink and sleep more than a reasonable being, and he knows his
+buffoonery will get him out of scrapes.  Withal, thoroughly good-
+natured and obliging, and perfectly honest, except where food and
+drink are concerned, which he pilfers like a monkey.  He worships
+S-, and won't allow her to carry anything, or to dirty her hands,
+if he is in the way to do it.  Some one suggested to him to kiss
+her, but he declined with terror, and said he should be hanged by
+my orders if he did.  He is a hideous little negro, with a
+monstrous-shaped head, every colour of the rainbow on his clothes,
+and a power of making faces which would enchant a schoolboy.  The
+height of his ambition would be to go to England with me.
+
+An old 'bastaard' woman, married to the Malay tailor here,
+explained to me my popularity with the coloured people, as set
+forth by 'dat Malay boy', my driver.  He told them he was sure I
+was a 'very great Missis', because of my 'plenty good behaviour';
+that I spoke to him just as to a white gentleman, and did not
+'laugh and talk nonsense talk'.  'Never say "Here, you black
+fellow", dat Misses.'  The English, when they mean to be good-
+natured, are generally offensively familiar, and 'talk nonsense
+talk', i.e. imitate the Dutch English of the Malays and blacks; the
+latter feel it the greatest compliment to be treated au serieux,
+and spoken to in good English.  Choslullah's theory was that I must
+be related to the Queen, in consequence of my not 'knowing bad
+behaviour'.  The Malays, who are intelligent and proud, of course
+feel the annoyance of vulgar familiarity more than the blacks, who
+are rather awe-struck by civility, though they like and admire it.
+
+Mrs. D- tells me that the coloured servant-girls, with all their
+faults, are immaculately honest in these parts; and, indeed, as
+every door and window is always left open, even when every soul is
+out, and nothing locked up, there must be no thieves.  Captain D-
+told me he had been in remote Dutch farmhouses, where rouleaux of
+gold were ranged under the thatch on the top of the low wall, the
+doors being always left open; and everywhere the Dutch boers keep
+their money by them, in coin.
+
+Jan. 3d.--We have had tremendous festivities here--a ball on New
+Year's-eve, and another on the 1st of January--and the shooting for
+Prince Alfred's rifle yesterday.  The difficulty of music for the
+ball was solved by the arrival of two Malay bricklayers to build
+the new parsonage, and I heard with my own ears the proof of what I
+had been told as to their extraordinary musical gifts.  When I went
+into the hall, a Dutchman was SCREECHING a concertina hideously.
+Presently in walked a yellow Malay, with a blue cotton handkerchief
+on his head, and a half-bred of negro blood (very dark brown), with
+a red handkerchief, and holding a rough tambourine.  The handsome
+yellow man took the concertina which seemed so discordant, and the
+touch of his dainty fingers transformed it to harmony.  He played
+dances with a precision and feeling quite unequalled, except by
+Strauss's band, and a variety which seemed endless.  I asked him if
+he could read music, at which he laughed heartily, and said, music
+came into the ears, not the eyes.  He had picked it all up from the
+bands in Capetown, or elsewhere.
+
+It was a strange sight,--the picturesque group, and the contrast
+between the quiet manners of the true Malay and the grotesque fun
+of the half-negro.  The latter made his tambourine do duty as a
+drum, rattled the bits of brass so as to produce an indescribable
+effect, nodded and grinned in wild excitement, and drank beer while
+his comrade took water.  The dancing was uninteresting enough.  The
+Dutchmen danced badly, and said not a word, but plodded on so as to
+get all the dancing they could for their money.  I went to bed at
+half-past eleven, but the ball went on till four.
+
+Next night there was genteeler company, and I did not go in, but
+lay in bed listening to the Malay's playing.  He had quite a fresh
+set of tunes, of which several were from the 'Traviata'!
+
+Yesterday was a real African summer's day.  The D-s had a tent and
+an awning, one for food and the other for drink, on the ground
+where the shooting took place.  At twelve o'clock Mrs. D- went down
+to sell cold chickens, &c., and I went with her, and sat under a
+tree in the bed of the little stream, now nearly dry.  The sun was
+such as in any other climate would strike you down, but here coup
+de soleil is unknown.  It broils you till your shoulders ache and
+your lips crack, but it does not make you feel the least languid,
+and you perspire very little; nor does it tan the skin as you would
+expect.  The light of the sun is by no means 'golden'--it is pure
+white--and the slightest shade of a tree or bush affords a
+delicious temperature, so light and fresh is the air.  They said
+the thermometer was at about 130 degrees where I was walking
+yesterday, but (barring the scorch) I could not have believed it.
+
+It was a very amusing day.  The great tall Dutchmen came in to
+shoot, and did but moderately, I thought.  The longest range was
+five hundred yards, and at that they shot well; at shorter ranges,
+poorly enough.  The best man made ten points.  But oh! what figures
+were there of negroes and coloured people!  I longed for a
+photographer.  Some coloured lads were exquisitely graceful, and
+composed beautiful tableaux vivants, after Murillo's beggar-boys.
+
+A poor little, very old Bosjesman crept up, and was jeered and
+bullied.  I scolded the lad who abused him for being rude to an old
+man, whereupon the poor little old creature squatted on the ground
+close by (for which he would have been kicked but for me), took off
+his ragged hat, and sat staring and nodding his small grey woolly
+head at me, and jabbering some little soliloquy very sotto voce.
+There was something shocking in the timidity with which he took the
+plate of food I gave him, and in the way in which he ate it, with
+the WRONG side of his little yellow hand, like a monkey.  A black,
+who had helped to fetch the hamper, suggested to me to give him
+wine instead of meat and bread, and make him drunk FOR FUN (the
+blacks and Hottentots copy the white man's manners TO THEM, when
+they get hold of a Bosjesman to practise upon); but upon this a
+handsome West Indian black, who had been cooking pies, fired up,
+and told him he was a 'nasty black rascal, and a Dutchman to boot',
+to insult a lady and an old man at once.  If you could see the
+difference between one negro and another, you would be quite
+convinced that education (i.e. circumstances) makes the race.  It
+was hardly conceivable that the hideous, dirty, bandy-legged,
+ragged creature, who looked down on the Bosjesman, and the well-
+made, smart fellow, with his fine eyes, jaunty red cap, and snow-
+white shirt and trousers, alert as the best German Kellner, were of
+the same blood; nothing but the colour was alike.
+
+Then came a Dutchman, and asked for six penn'orth of 'brood en
+kaas', and haggled for beer; and Englishmen, who bought chickens
+and champagne without asking the price.  One rich old boer got
+three lunches, and then 'trekked' (made off) without paying at all.
+Then came a Hottentot, stupidly drunk, with a fiddle, and was
+beaten by a little red-haired Scotchman, and his fiddle smashed.
+The Hottentot hit at his aggressor, who then declared he HAD BEEN a
+policeman, and insisted on taking him into custody and to the
+'Tronk' (prison) on his own authority, but was in turn sent flying
+by a gigantic Irishman, who 'wouldn't see the poor baste abused'.
+The Irishman was a farmer; I never saw such a Hercules--and beaming
+with fun and good nature.  He was very civil, and answered my
+questions, and talked like an intelligent man; but when Captain D-
+asked him with an air of some anxiety, if he was coming to the
+hotel, he replied, 'No, sir, no; I wouldn't be guilty of such a
+misdemeanour.  I am aware that I was a disgrace and opprobrium to
+your house, sir, last time I was there, sir.  No, sir, I shall
+sleep in my cart, and not come into the presence of ladies.'
+Hereupon he departed, and I was informed that he had been drunk for
+seventeen days, sans desemparer, on his last visit to Caledon.
+However, he kept quite sober on this occasion, and amused himself
+by making the little blackies scramble for halfpence in the pools
+left in the bed of the river.  Among our customers was a very
+handsome black man, with high straight nose, deep-set eyes, and a
+small mouth, smartly dressed in a white felt hat, paletot, and
+trousers.  He is the shoemaker, and is making a pair of
+'Veldschoen' for you, which you will delight in.  They are what the
+rough boers and Hottentots wear, buff-hide barbarously tanned and
+shaped, and as soft as woollen socks.  The Othello-looking
+shoemaker's name is Moor, and his father told him he came of a
+'good breed'; that was all he knew.
+
+A very pleasing English farmer, who had been educated in Belgium,
+came and ordered a bottle of champagne, and shyly begged me to
+drink a glass, whereupon we talked of crops and the like; and an
+excellent specimen of a colonist he appeared:  very gentle and
+unaffected, with homely good sense, and real good breeding--such a
+contrast to the pert airs and vulgarity of Capetown and of the
+people in (colonial) high places.  Finding we had no carriage, he
+posted off and borrowed a cart of one man and harness of another,
+and put his and his son's riding horses to it, to take Mrs. D- and
+me home.  As it was still early, he took us a 'little drive'; and
+oh, ye gods! what a terrific and dislocating pleasure was that!  At
+a hard gallop, Mr. M- (with the mildest and steadiest air and with
+perfect safety) took us right across country.  It is true there
+were no fences; but over bushes, ditches, lumps of rock,
+watercourses, we jumped, flew, and bounded, and up every hill we
+went racing pace.  I arrived at home much bewildered, and feeling
+more like Burger's Lenore than anything else, till I saw Mr. M-'s
+steady, pleasant face quite undisturbed, and was informed that such
+was the way of driving of Cape farmers.
+
+We found the luckless Jack in such a state of furious drunkenness
+that he had to be dismissed on the spot, not without threats of the
+'Tronk', and once more Kleenboy fills the office of boots.  He
+returned in a ludicrous state of penitence and emaciation, frankly
+admitting that it was better to work hard and get 'plenty grub',
+than to work less and get none;--still, however, protesting against
+work at all.
+
+January 7th.--For the last four days it has again been blowing a
+wintry hurricane.  Every one says that the continuance of these
+winds so late into the summer (this answers to July) is unheard of,
+and MUST cease soon.  In Table Bay, I hear a good deal of mischief
+has been done to the shipping.
+
+I hope my long yarns won't bore you.  I put down what seems new and
+amusing to me at the moment, but by the time it reaches you, it
+will seem very dull and commonplace.  I hear that the Scotchman who
+attacked poor Aria, the crazy Hottentot, is a 'revival lecturer',
+and was 'simply exhorting him to break his fiddle and come to
+Christ' (the phrase is a clergyman's, I beg to observe); and the
+saints are indignant that, after executing the pious purpose as far
+as the fiddle went, he was prevented by the chief constable from
+dragging him to the Tronk.  The 'revival' mania has broken out
+rather violently in some places; the infection was brought from St.
+Helena, I am told.  At Capetown, old Abdool Jemaalee told me that
+English Christians were getting more like Malays, and had begun to
+hold 'Kalifahs' at Simon's Bay.  These are festivals in which
+Mussulman fanatics run knives into their flesh, go into
+convulsions, &c, to the sound of music, like the Arab described by
+Houdin.  Of course the poor blacks go quite demented.
+
+I intend to stay here another two or three weeks, and then to go to
+Worcester--stay a bit; Paarl, ditto; Stellenbosch, ditto--and go to
+Capetown early in March, and in April to embark for home.
+
+January 15th.--No mail in yet.  We have had beautiful weather the
+last three days.  Captain D- has been in Capetown, and bought a
+horse, which he rode home seventy-five miles in a day and a half,--
+the beast none the worse nor tired.  I am to ride him, and so shall
+see the country if the vile cold winds keep off.
+
+This morning I walked on the Veld, and met a young black shepherd
+leading his sheep and goats, and playing on a guitar composed of an
+old tin mug covered with a bit of sheepskin and a handle of rough
+wood, with pegs, and three strings of sheep-gut.  I asked him to
+sing, and he flung himself at my feet in an attitude that would
+make Watts crazy with delight, and CROONED queer little mournful
+ditties.  I gave him sixpence, and told him not to get drunk.  He
+said, 'Oh no; I will buy bread enough to make my belly stiff--I
+almost never had my belly stiff.'  He likewise informed me he had
+just been in the Tronk (prison), and on my asking why, replied:
+'Oh, for fighting, and telling lies;' Die liebe Unschuld!  (Dear
+innocence!)
+
+Hottentot figs are rather nice--a green fig-shaped thing,
+containing about a spoonful of SALT-SWEET insipid glue, which you
+suck out.  This does not sound nice, but it is.  The plant has a
+thick, succulent, triangular leaf, creeping on the ground, and
+growing anywhere, without earth or water.  Figs proper are common
+here, but tasteless; and the people pick all their fruit green, and
+eat it so too.  The children are all crunching hard peaches and
+plums just now, particularly some little half-breeds near here, who
+are frightfully ugly.  Fancy the children of a black woman and a
+red-haired man; the little monsters are as black as the mother, and
+have RED wool--you never saw so diabolical an appearance.  Some of
+the coloured people are very pretty; for example, a coal-black girl
+of seventeen, and my washerwoman, who is brown.  They are
+wonderfully slender and agile, and quite old hard-working women
+have waists you could span.  They never grow thick and square, like
+Europeans.
+
+I could write a volume on Cape horses.  Such valiant little beasts,
+and so composed in temper, I never saw.  They are nearly all bays--
+a few very dark grey, which are esteemed; VERY few white or light
+grey.  I have seen no black, and only one dark chestnut.  They are
+not cobs, and look 'very little of them', and have no beauty; but
+one of these little brutes, ungroomed, half-fed, seldom stabled,
+will carry a six-and-a-half-foot Dutchman sixty miles a day, day
+after day, at a shuffling easy canter, six miles an hour.  You 'off
+saddle' every three hours, and let him roll; you also let him drink
+all he can get; his coat shines and his eye is bright, and
+unsoundness is very rare.  They are never properly broke, and the
+soft-mouthed colts are sometimes made vicious by the cruel bits and
+heavy hands; but by nature their temper is perfect.
+
+Every morning all the horses in the village are turned loose, and a
+general gallop takes place to the water tank, where they drink and
+lounge a little; and the young ones are fetched home by their
+niggers, while the old stagers know they will be wanted, and
+saunter off by themselves.  I often attend the Houyhnhnm
+conversazione at the tank, at about seven o'clock, and am amused by
+their behaviour; and I continually wish I could see Ned's face on
+witnessing many equine proceedings here.  To see a farmer outspan
+and turn the team of active little beasts loose on the boundless
+veld to amuse themselves for an hour or two, sure that they will
+all be there, would astonish him a little; and then to offer a
+horse nothing but a roll in the dust to refresh himself withal!
+
+One unpleasant sight here is the skeletons of horses and oxen along
+the roadside; or at times a fresh carcase surrounded by a
+convocation of huge serious-looking carrion crows, with neat white
+neck-cloths.  The skeletons look like wrecks, and make you feel
+very lonely on the wide veld.  In this district, and in most, I
+believe, the roads are mere tracks over the hard, level earth, and
+very good they are.  When one gets rutty, you drive parallel to it,
+till the bush is worn out and a new track is formed.
+
+January 17th.--Lovely weather all the week.  Summer well set in.
+
+
+
+LETTER VI--CALEDON
+
+
+
+Caledon, January 19th.
+
+Dearest Mother,
+
+Till this last week, the weather was pertinaciously cold and windy;
+and I had resolved to go to Worcester, which lies in a 'Kessel',
+and is really hot.  But now the glorious African summer is come,
+and I believe this is the weather of Paradise.  I got up at four
+this morning, when the Dutchmen who had slept here were starting in
+their carts and waggons.  It was quite light; but the moon shone
+brilliantly still, and had put on a bright rose-coloured veil,
+borrowed from the rising sun on the opposite horizon.  The
+freshness (without a shadow of cold or damp) of the air was
+indescribable--no dew was on the ground.  I went up the hill-side,
+along the 'Sloot' (channel, which supplies all our water), into the
+'Kloof' between the mountains, and clambered up to the 'Venster
+Klip', from which natural window the view is very fine.  The
+flowers are all gone and the grass all dead.  Rhenoster boschjes
+and Hottentot fig are green everywhere, and among the rocks all
+manner of shrubs, and far too much 'Wacht een beetje' (Wait a bit),
+a sort of series of natural fish-hooks, which try the robustest
+patience.  Between seven and eight, the sun gets rather hot, and I
+came in and TUBBED, and sat on the stoep (a sort of terrace, in
+front of every house in South Africa).  I breakfast at nine, sit on
+the stoep again till the sun comes round, and then retreat behind
+closed shutters from the stinging sun.  The AIR is fresh and light
+all day, though the sun is tremendous; but one has no languid
+feeling or desire to lie about, unless one is sleepy.  We dine at
+two or half-past, and at four or five the heat is over, and one
+puts on a shawl to go out in the afternoon breeze.  The nights are
+cool, so as always to want one blanket.  I still have a cough; but
+it is getting better, so that I can always eat and walk.  Mine host
+has just bought a horse, which he is going to try with a petticoat
+to-day, and if he goes well I shall ride.
+
+I like this inn-life, because I see all the 'neighbourhood'--
+farmers and traders--whom I like far better than the GENTILITY of
+Capetown.  I have given letters to England to a 'boer', who is
+'going home', i.e. to Europe, the FIRST OF HIS RACE SINCE THE
+REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES, when some poor refugees were
+inveigled hither by the Dutch Governor, and oppressed worse than
+the Hottentots.  M. de Villiers has had no education AT ALL, and
+has worked, and traded, and farmed,--but the breed tells; he is a
+pure and thorough Frenchman, unable to speak a word of French.
+When I went in to dinner, he rose and gave me a chair with a bow
+which, with his appearance, made me ask, 'Monsieur vient
+d'arriver?'  This at once put him out and pleased him.  He is very
+unlike a Dutchman.  If you think that any of the French will feel
+as I felt to this far-distant brother of theirs, pray give him a
+few letters; but remember that he can speak only English and Dutch,
+and a little German.  Here his name is CALLED 'Filljee', but I told
+him to drop that barbarism in Europe; De Villiers ought to speak
+for itself.  He says they came from the neighbourhood of Bordeaux.
+
+The postmaster, Heer Klein, and his old Pylades, Heer Ley, are
+great cronies of mine--stout old greybeards, toddling down the hill
+together.  I sometimes go and sit on the stoep with the two old
+bachelors, and they take it as a great compliment; and Heer Klein
+gave me my letters all decked with flowers, and wished 'Vrolyke
+tydings, Mevrouw,' most heartily.  He has also made his tributary
+mail-cart Hottentots bring from various higher mountain ranges the
+beautiful everlasting flowers, which will make pretty wreaths for
+J-.  When I went to his house to thank him, I found a handsome
+Malay, with a basket of 'Klipkaus', a shell-fish much esteemed
+here.  Old Klein told me they were sent him by a Malay who was born
+in his father's house, a slave, and had been HIS 'BOY' and play-
+fellow.  Now, the slave is far richer than the old young master,
+and no waggon comes without a little gift--oranges, fish, &c.--for
+'Wilhem'.  When Klein goes to Capetown, the old Malay seats him in
+a grand chair and sits on a little wooden stool at his feet; Klein
+begs him, as 'Huisheer', to sit properly; but, 'Neen Wilhem, Ik zal
+niet; ik kan niet vergeten.'  'Good boy!' said old Klein; 'good
+people the Malays.'  It is a relief, after the horrors one has
+heard of Dutch cruelty, to see such an 'idyllisches Verhaltniss'.
+I have heard other instances of the same fidelity from Malays, but
+they were utterly unappreciated, and only told to prove the
+excellence of slavery, and 'how well the rascals must have been
+off'.
+
+I have fallen in love with a Hottentot baby here.  Her mother is
+all black, with a broad face and soft spaniel eyes, and the father
+is Bastaard; but the baby (a girl, nine months old), has walked out
+of one of Leonardo da Vinci's pictures.  I never saw so beautiful a
+child.  She has huge eyes with the spiritual look he gives to them,
+and is exquisite in every way.  When the Hottentot blood is
+handsome, it is beautiful; there is a delicacy and softness about
+some of the women which is very pretty, and the eyes are those of a
+GOOD dog.  Most of them are hideous, and nearly all drink; but they
+are very clean and honest.  Their cottages are far superior in
+cleanliness to anything out of England, except in picked places,
+like some parts of Belgium; and they wash as much as they can, with
+the bad water-supply, and the English outcry if they strip out of
+doors to bathe.  Compared to French peasants, they are very clean
+indeed, and even the children are far more decent and cleanly in
+their habits than those of France.  The woman who comes here to
+clean and scour is a model of neatness in her work and her person
+(quite black), but she gets helplessly drunk as soon as she has a
+penny to buy a glass of wine; for a penny, a half-pint tumbler of
+very strong and remarkably nasty wine is sold at the canteens.
+
+I have many more 'humours' to tell, but A- can show you all the
+long story I have written.  I hope it does not seem very stale and
+decies repetita.  All being new and curious to the eye here, one
+becomes long-winded about mere trifles.
+
+One small thing more.  The first few shillings that a coloured
+woman has to spend on her cottage go in--what do you think?--A
+grand toilet table of worked muslin over pink, all set out with
+little 'objets'--such as they are:  if there is nothing else, there
+is that here, as at Capetown, and all along to Simon's Bay.  Now,
+what is the use or comfort of a duchesse to a Hottentot family?  I
+shall never see those toilets again without thinking of Hottentots-
+-what a baroque association of ideas!  I intend, in a day or two,
+to go over to 'Gnadenthal', the Moravian missionary station,
+founded in 1736--the 'bluhende Gemeinde von Hottentoten'.  How
+little did I think to see it, when we smiled at the phrase in old
+Mr. Steinkopf's sermon years ago in London!  The MISSIONARIZED
+Hottentots are not, as it is said, thought well of--being even
+tipsier than the rest; but I may see a full-blood one, and even a
+true Bosjesman, which is worth a couple of hours' drive; and the
+place is said to be beautiful.
+
+This climate is evidently a styptic of great power, I shall write a
+few lines to the Lancet about Caledon and its hot baths--'Bad
+Caledon', as the Germans at Houw Hoek call it.  The baths do not
+concern me, as they are chalybeate; but they seem very effectual in
+many cases.  Yet English people never come here; they stay at
+Capetown, which must be a furnace now, or at Wynberg, which is damp
+and chill (comparatively); at most, they get to Stellenbosch.  I
+mean visitors, not settlers; THEY are everywhere.  I look the
+colour of a Hottentot.  Now I MUST leave off.
+
+Your most affectionate
+
+L. D. G.
+
+
+
+LETTER VII--GNADENTHAL
+
+
+
+Caledon, Jan. 28th.
+
+Well, I have been to Gnadenthal, and seen the 'blooming parish',
+and a lovely spot it is.  A large village nestled in a deep valley,
+surrounded by high mountains on three sides, and a lower range in
+front.  We started early on Saturday, and drove over a mighty queer
+road, and through a river.  Oh, ye gods! what a shaking and
+pounding!  We were rattled up like dice in a box.  Nothing but a
+Cape cart, Cape horses, and a Hottentot driver, above all, could
+have accomplished it.  Captain D- rode, and had the best of it.  On
+the road we passed three or four farms, at all which horses were
+GALLOPING OUT the grain, or men were winnowing it by tossing it up
+with wooden shovels to let the wind blow away the chaff.  We did
+the twenty-four miles up and down the mountain roads in two hours
+and a half, with our valiant little pair of horses; it is
+incredible how they go.  We stopped at a nice cottage on the
+hillside belonging to a ci-devant slave, one Christian Rietz, a
+WHITE man, with brown woolly hair, sharp features, grey eyes, and
+NOT woolly moustaches.  He said he was a 'Scotch bastaard', and 'le
+bon sang parlait--tres-haut meme', for a more thriving, shrewd,
+sensible fellow I never saw.  His FATHER and master had had to let
+him go when all slaves were emancipated, and he had come to
+Gnadenthal.  He keeps a little inn in the village, and a shop and a
+fine garden.  The cottage we lodged in was on the mountain side,
+and had been built for his son, who was dead; and his adopted
+daughter, a pretty coloured girl, exactly like a southern
+Frenchwoman, waited on us, assisted by about six or seven other
+women, who came chiefly to stare.  Vrouw Rietz was as black as a
+coal, but SO pretty!--a dear, soft, sleek, old lady, with beautiful
+eyes, and the kind pleasant ways which belong to nice blacks; and,
+though old and fat, still graceful and lovely in face, hands, and
+arms.  The cottage was thus:- One large hall; my bedroom on the
+right, S-'s on the left; the kitchen behind me; Miss Rietz behind
+S-; mud floors daintily washed over with fresh cow-dung; ceiling of
+big rafters, just as they had grown, on which rested bamboo canes
+close together ACROSS the rafters, and bound together between each,
+with transverse bamboo--a pretty BEEHIVEY effect; at top, mud
+again, and then a high thatched roof and a loft or zolder for
+forage, &c.; the walls of course mud, very thick and whitewashed.
+The bedrooms tiny; beds, clean sweet melies (maize) straw, with
+clean sheets, and eight good pillows on each; glass windows (a
+great distinction), exquisite cleanliness, and hearty civility;
+good food, well cooked; horrid tea and coffee, and hardly any milk;
+no end of fruit.  In all the gardens it hung on the trees thicker
+than the leaves.  Never did I behold such a profusion of fruit and
+vegetables.
+
+But first I must tell what struck me most, I asked one of the
+Herrenhut brethren whether there were any REAL Hottentots, and he
+said, 'Yes, one;' and next morning, as I sat waiting for early
+prayers under the big oak-trees in the Plaats (square), he came up,
+followed by a tiny old man hobbling along with a long stick to
+support him.  'Here', said he, 'is the LAST Hottentot; he is a
+hundred and seven years old, and lives all alone.'  I looked on the
+little, wizened, yellow face, and was shocked that he should be
+dragged up like a wild beast to be stared at.  A feeling of pity
+which felt like remorse fell upon me, and my eyes filled as I rose
+and stood before him, so tall and like a tyrant and oppressor,
+while he uncovered his poor little old snow-white head, and peered
+up in my face.  I led him to the seat, and helped him to sit down,
+and said in Dutch, 'Father, I hope you are not tired; you are old.'
+He saw and heard as well as ever, and spoke good Dutch in a firm
+voice.  'Yes, I am above a hundred years old, and alone--quite
+alone.'  I sat beside him, and he put his head on one side, and
+looked curiously up at me with his faded, but still piercing little
+wild eyes.  Perhaps he had a perception of what I felt--yet I
+hardly think so; perhaps he thought I was in trouble, for he crept
+close up to me, and put one tiny brown paw into my hand, which he
+stroked with the other, and asked (like most coloured people) if I
+had children.  I said, 'Yes, at home in England;' and he patted my
+hand again, and said, 'God bless them!'  It was a relief to feel
+that he was pleased, for I should have felt like a murderer if my
+curiosity had added a moment's pain to so tragic a fate.
+
+This may sound like sentimentalism; but you cannot conceive the
+effect of looking on the last of a race once the owners of all this
+land, and now utterly gone.  His look was not quite human,
+physically speaking;--a good head, small wild-beast eyes, piercing
+and restless; cheek-bones strangely high and prominent, nose QUITE
+flat, mouth rather wide; thin shapeless lips, and an indescribably
+small, long, pointed chin, with just a very little soft white
+woolly beard; his head covered with extremely short close white
+wool, which ended round the poll in little ringlets.  Hands and
+feet like an English child of seven or eight, and person about the
+size of a child of eleven.  He had all his teeth, and though shrunk
+to nothing, was very little wrinkled in the face, and not at all in
+the hands, which were dark brown, while his face was yellow.  His
+manner, and way of speaking were like those of an old peasant in
+England, only his voice was clearer and stronger, and his
+perceptions not blunted by age.  He had travelled with one of the
+missionaries in the year 1790, or thereabouts, and remained with
+them ever since.
+
+I went into the church--a large, clean, rather handsome building,
+consecrated in 1800--and heard a very good sort of Litany, mixed
+with such singing as only black voices can produce.  The organ was
+beautifully played by a Bastaard lad.  The Herrenhuters use very
+fine chants, and the perfect ear and heavenly voices of a large
+congregation, about six hundred, all coloured people, made music
+more beautiful than any chorus-singing I ever heard.
+
+Prayers lasted half an hour; then the congregation turned out of
+doors, and the windows were opened.  Some of the people went away,
+and others waited for the 'allgemeine Predigt'.  In a quarter of an
+hour a much larger congregation than the first assembled, the girls
+all with net-handkerchiefs tied round their heads so as to look
+exactly like the ancient Greek head-dress with a double fillet--the
+very prettiest and neatest coiffure I ever saw.  The gowns were
+made like those of English girls of the same class, but far
+smarter, cleaner, and gayer in colour--pink, and green, and yellow,
+and bright blue; several were all in white, with white gloves.  The
+men and women sit separate, and the women's side was a bed of
+tulips.  The young fellows were very smart indeed, with muslin or
+gauze, either white, pink, or blue, rolled round their hats (that
+is universal here, on account of the sun).  The Hottentots, as they
+are called--that is, those of mixed Dutch and Hottentot origin
+(correctly, 'bastaards')--have a sort of blackguard elegance in
+their gait and figure which is peculiar to them; a mixture of negro
+or Mozambique blood alters it altogether.  The girls have the
+elegance without the blackguard look; ALL are slender, most are
+tall; all graceful, all have good hands and feet; some few are
+handsome in the face and many very interesting-looking.  The
+complexion is a pale olive-yellow, and the hair more or less
+woolly, face flat, and cheekbones high, eyes small and bright.
+These are by far the most intelligent--equal, indeed, to whites.  A
+mixture of black blood often gives real beauty, but takes off from
+the 'air', and generally from the talent; but then the blacks are
+so pleasant, and the Hottentots are taciturn and reserved.  The old
+women of this breed are the grandest hags I ever saw; they are
+clean and well dressed, and tie up their old faces in white
+handkerchiefs like corpses,--faces like those of Andrea del Sarto's
+old women; they are splendid.  Also, they are very clean people,
+addicted to tubbing more than any others.  The maid-of-all-work,
+who lounges about your breakfast table in rags and dishevelled
+hair, has been in the river before you were awake, or, if that was
+too far off, in a tub.  They are also far cleaner in their huts
+than any but the VERY BEST English poor.
+
+The 'Predigt' was delivered, after more singing, by a missionary
+cabinet-maker, in Dutch, very ranting, and not very wise; the
+congregation was singularly decorous and attentive, but did not
+seem at all excited or impressed--just like a well-bred West-end
+audience, only rather more attentive.  The service lasted three-
+quarters of an hour, including a short prayer and two hymns.  The
+people came out and filed off in total silence, and very quickly,
+the tall graceful girls draping their gay silk shawls beautifully.
+There are seven missionaries, all in orders but one, the
+blacksmith, and all married, except the resident director of the
+boys' boarding-school; there is a doctor, a carpenter, a cabinet-
+maker, a shoe-maker, and a storekeeper--a very agreeable man, who
+had been missionary in Greenland and Labrador, and interpreter to
+MacClure.  There is one 'Studirter Theolog'.  All are Germans, and
+so are their wives.  My friend the storekeeper married without
+having ever beheld his wife before they met at the altar, and came
+on board ship at once with her.  He said it was as good a way of
+marrying as any other, and that they were happy together.  She was
+lying in, so I did not see her.  At eight years old, their children
+are all sent home to Germany to be educated, and they seldom see
+them again.  On each side of the church are schools, and next to
+them the missionaries' houses on one side of the square, and on the
+other a row of workshops, where the Hottentots are taught all
+manner of trades.  I have got a couple of knives, made at
+Gnadenthal, for the children.  The girls occupy the school in the
+morning, and the boys in the afternoon; half a day is found quite
+enough of lessons in this climate.  The infant school was of both
+sexes, but a different set morning and afternoon.  The
+missionaries' children were in the infant school; and behind the
+little blonde German 'Madels' three jet black niggerlings rolled
+over each other like pointer-pups, and grinned, and didn't care a
+straw for the spelling; while the dingy yellow little bastaards
+were straining their black eyes out, with eagerness to answer the
+master's questions.  He and the mistress were both Bastaards, and
+he seemed an excellent teacher.  The girls were learning writing
+from a master, and Bible history from a mistress, also people of
+colour; and the stupid set (mostly black) were having spelling
+hammered into their thick skulls by another yellow mistress, in
+another room.  At the boarding school were twenty lads, from
+thirteen up to twenty, in training for school-teachers at different
+stations.  Gnadenthal supplies the Church of England with them, as
+well as their own stations.  There were Caffres, Fingoes, a
+Mantatee, one boy evidently of some Oriental blood, with glossy,
+smooth hair and a copper skin--and the rest Bastaards of various
+hues, some mixed with black, probably Mozambique.  The Caffre lads
+were splendid young Hercules'.  They had just printed the first
+book in the Caffre language (I've got it for Dr. Hawtrey,)--
+extracts from the New Testament,--and I made them read the sheets
+they were going to bind; it is a beautiful language, like Spanish
+in tone, only with a queer 'click' in it.  The boys drew, like
+Chinese, from 'copies', and wrote like copper-plate; they sang some
+of Mendelssohn's choruses from 'St. Paul' splendidly, the Caffres
+rolling out soft rich bass voices, like melodious thunder.  They
+are clever at handicrafts, and fond of geography and natural
+history, incapable of mathematics, quick at languages, utterly
+incurious about other nations, and would all rather work in the
+fields than learn anything but music; good boys, honest, but
+'trotzig'.  So much for Caffres, Fingoes, &c.  The Bastaards are as
+clever as whites, and more docile--so the 'rector' told me.  The
+boy who played the organ sang the 'Lorelei' like an angel, and
+played us a number of waltzes and other things on the piano, but he
+was too shy to talk; while the Caffres crowded round me, and
+chattered away merrily.  The Mantatees, whom I cannot distinguish
+from Caffres, are scattered all over the colony, and rival the
+English as workmen and labourers--fine stalwart, industrious
+fellows.  Our little 'boy' Kleenboy hires a room for fifteen
+shillings a month, and takes in his compatriots as lodgers at half
+a crown a week--the usurious little rogue!  His chief, one James,
+is a bricklayer here, and looks and behaves like a prince.  It is
+fine to see his black arms, ornamented with silver bracelets,
+hurling huge stones about.
+
+All Gnadenthal is wonderfully fruitful, being well watered, but it
+is not healthy for whites; I imagine, too hot and damp.  There are
+three or four thousand coloured people there, under the control of
+the missionaries, who allow no canteens at all.  The people may
+have what they please at home, but no public drinking-place is
+allowed, and we had to take our own beer and wine for the three
+days.  The gardens and burial-ground are beautiful, and the square
+is entirely shaded by about ten or twelve superb oaks; nothing
+prettier can be conceived.  It is not popular in the neighbourhood.
+'You see it makes the d-d niggers cheeky' to have homes of their
+own--and the girls are said to be immoral.  As to that, there are
+no so-called 'morals' among the coloured people, and how or why
+should there?  It is an honour to one of these girls to have a
+child by a white man, and it is a degradation to him to marry a
+dark girl.  A pious stiff old Dutchwoman who came here the other
+day for the Sacrament (which takes place twice a year), had one
+girl with her, big with child by her son, who also came for the
+Sacrament, and two in the straw at home by the other son; this
+caused her exactly as much emotion as I feel when my cat kittens.
+No one takes any notice, either to blame or to nurse the poor
+things--they scramble through it as pussy does.  The English are
+almost equally contemptuous; but there is one great difference.  My
+host, for instance, always calls a black 'a d-d nigger'; but if
+that nigger is wronged or oppressed he fights for him, or bails him
+out of the Tronk, and an English jury gives a just verdict; while a
+Dutch one simply finds for a Dutchman, against any one else, and
+ALWAYS against a dark man.  I believe this to be true, from what I
+have seen and heard; and certainly the coloured people have a great
+preference for the English.
+
+I am persecuted by the ugliest and blackest Mozambiquer I have yet
+seen, a bricklayer's labourer, who can speak English, and says he
+was servant to an English Captain--'Oh, a good fellow he was, only
+he's dead!'  He now insists on my taking him as a servant.  'I
+dessay your man at home is a good chap, and I'll be a good boy, and
+cook very nice.'  He is thick-set and short and strong.  Nature has
+adorned him with a cock eye and a yard of mouth, and art, with a
+prodigiously tall white chimney-pot hat with the crown out, a
+cotton nightcap, and a wondrous congeries of rags.  He professes to
+be cook, groom, and 'walley', and is sure you would be pleased with
+his attentions.
+
+Well, to go back to Gnadenthal.  I wandered all over the village on
+Sunday afternoon, and peeped into the cottages.  All were neat and
+clean, with good dressers of crockery, the VERY poorest, like the
+worst in Weybridge sandpits; but they had no glass windows, only a
+wooden shutter, and no doors; a calico curtain, or a sort of hurdle
+supplying its place.  The people nodded and said 'Good day!' but
+took no further notice of me, except the poor old Hottentot, who
+was seated on a doorstep.  He rose and hobbled up to meet me and
+take my hand again.  He seemed to enjoy being helped along and
+seated down carefully, and shook and patted my hand repeatedly when
+I took leave of him.  At this the people stared a good deal, and
+one woman came to talk to me.
+
+In the evening I sat on a bench in the square, and saw the people
+go in to 'Abendsegen'.  The church was lighted, and as I sat there
+and heard the lovely singing, I thought it was impossible to
+conceive a more romantic scene.  On Monday I saw all the schools,
+and then looked at the great strong Caffre lads playing in the
+square.  One of them stood to be pelted by five or six others, and
+as the stones came, he twisted and turned and jumped, and was
+hardly ever hit, and when he was, he didn't care, though the others
+hurled like catapults.  It was the most wonderful display of
+activity and grace, and quite incredible that such a huge fellow
+should be so quick and light.  When I found how comfortable dear
+old Mrs. Rietz made me, I was sorry I had hired the cart and kept
+it to take me home, for I would gladly have stayed longer, and the
+heat did me no harm; but I did not like to throw away a pound or
+two, and drove back that evening.  Mrs. Rietz, told me her mother
+was a Mozambiquer.  'And your father?' said I.  'Oh, I don't know.
+MY MOTHER WAS ONLY A SLAVE.'  She, too, was a slave, but said she
+'never knew it', her 'missus' was so good; a Dutch lady, at a farm
+I had passed, on the road, who had a hundred and fifty slaves.  I
+liked my Hottentot hut amazingly, and the sweet brown bread, and
+the dinner cooked so cleanly on the bricks in the kitchen.  The
+walls were whitewashed and adorned with wreaths of everlasting
+flowers and some quaint old prints from Loutherburg--pastoral
+subjects, not exactly edifying.
+
+Well, I have prosed unconscionably, so adieu for the present.
+
+February 3d.--Many happy returns of your birthday, dear -.  I had a
+bottle of champagne to drink your health, and partly to swell the
+bill, which these good people make so moderate, that I am half
+ashamed.  I get everything that Caledon can furnish for myself and
+S- for 15l. a month.
+
+On Saturday we got the sad news of Prince Albert's death, and it
+created real consternation here.  What a thoroughly unexpected
+calamity!  Every one is already dressed in deep mourning.  It is
+more general than in a village of the same size at home--(how I
+have caught the colonial trick of always saying 'home' for England!
+Dutchmen who can barely speak English, and never did or will see
+England, equally talk of 'news from home').  It also seems, by the
+papers of the 24th of December, which came by a steamer the other
+day, that war is imminent.  I shall have to wait for convoy, I
+suppose, as I object to walking the plank from a Yankee privateer.
+I shall wait here for the next mail, and then go back to Capetown,
+stopping by the way, so as to get there early in March, and arrange
+for my voyage.  The weather had a relapse into cold, and an attempt
+at rain.  Pity it failed, for the drought is dreadful this year,
+chiefly owing to the unusual quantity of sharp drying winds--a most
+unlucky summer for the country and for me.
+
+My old friend Klein, who told me several instances of the kindness
+and gratitude of former slaves, poured out to me the misery he had
+undergone from the 'ingratitude' of a certain Rosina, a slave-girl
+of his.  She was in her youth handsome, clever, the best
+horsebreaker, bullock-trainer and driver, and hardest worker in the
+district.  She had two children by Klein, then a young fellow; six
+by another white man, and a few more by two husbands of her own
+race!  But she was of a rebellious spirit, and took to drink.
+After the emancipation, she used to go in front of Klein's windows
+and read the statute in a loud voice on every anniversary of the
+day; and as if that did not enrage him enough, she pertinaciously
+(whenever she was a little drunk) kissed him by main force every
+time she met him in the street, exclaiming, 'Aha! when I young and
+pretty slave-girl you make kiss me then; now I ugly, drunk, dirty
+old devil and free woman, I kiss you!'  Frightful retributive
+justice!  I struggled hard to keep my countenance, but the fat old
+fellow's good-humoured, rueful face was too much for me.  His
+tormentor is dead, but he retains a painful impression of her
+'ingratitude '.
+
+Our little Mantatee 'Kleenboy' has again, like Jeshurun, 'waxed fat
+and kicked', as soon as he had eaten enough to be once more plump
+and shiny.  After his hungry period, he took to squatting on the
+stoep, just in front of the hall-door, and altogether declining to
+do anything; so he is superseded by an equally ugly little red-
+headed Englishman.  The Irish housemaid has married the German
+baker (a fine match for her!), and a dour little Scotch
+Presbyterian has come up from Capetown in her place.  Such are the
+vicissitudes of colonial house-keeping!  The only 'permanency' is
+the old soldier of Captain D-'s regiment, who is barman in the
+canteen, and not likely to leave 'his honour', and the coloured
+girl, who improves on acquaintance.  She wants to ingratiate
+herself with me, and get taken to England.  Her father is an
+Englishman, and of course the brown mother and her large family
+always live in the fear of his 'going home' and ignoring their
+existence; a MARRIAGE with the mother of his children would be too
+much degradation for him to submit to.  Few of the coloured people
+are ever married, but they don't separate oftener than REALLY
+married folks.  Bill, the handsome West Indian black, married my
+pretty washerwoman Rosalind, and was thought rather assuming
+because he was asked in church and lawfully married; and she wore a
+handsome lilac silk gown and a white wreath and veil, and very well
+she looked in them.  She had a child of two years old, which did
+not at all disconcert Bill; but he continues to be dignified, and
+won't let her go and wash clothes in the river, because the hot sun
+makes her ill, and it is not fit work for women.
+
+Sunday, 9th.--Last night a dance took place in a house next door to
+this, and a party of boers attempted to go in, but were repulsed by
+a sortie of the young men within.  Some of the more peaceable boers
+came in here and wanted ale, which was refused, as they were
+already very vinous; so they imbibed ginger-beer, whereof one drank
+thirty-four bottles to his own share!  Inspired by this drink, they
+began to quarrel, and were summarily turned out.  They spent the
+whole night, till five this morning, scuffling and vociferating in
+the street.  The constables discreetly stayed in bed, displaying
+the true Dogberry spirit, which leads them to take up Hottentots,
+drunk or sober, to show their zeal, but carefully to avoid meddling
+with stalwart boers, from six to six and a half feet high and
+strong in proportion.  The jabbering of Dutch brings to mind
+Demosthenes trying to outroar a stormy sea with his mouth full of
+pebbles.  The hardest blows are those given with the tongue, though
+much pulling of hair and scuffling takes place.  'Verdomde
+Schmeerlap!'--'Donder and Bliksem! am I a verdomde Schmeerlap?'--
+'Ja, u is,' &c., &c.  I could not help laughing heartily as I lay
+in bed, at hearing the gambols of these Titan cubs; for this is a
+boer's notion of enjoying himself.  This morning, I hear, the
+street was strewn with the hair they had pulled out of each other's
+heads.  All who come here make love to S-; not by describing their
+tender feelings, but by enumerating the oxen, sheep, horses, land,
+money, &c., of which they are possessed, and whereof, by the law of
+this colony, she would become half-owner on marriage.  There is a
+fine handsome Van Steen, who is very persevering; but S- does not
+seem to fancy becoming Mevrouw at all.  The demand for English
+girls as wives is wonderful here.  The nasty cross little ugly
+Scotch maid has had three offers already, in one fortnight!
+
+February 18th.--I expect to receive the letters by the English mail
+to-morrow morning, and to go to Worcester on Thursday.  On Saturday
+the young doctor--good-humoured, jolly, big, young Dutchman--drove
+me, with his pretty little greys, over to two farms; at one I ate
+half a huge melon, and at the other, uncounted grapes.  We poor
+Europeans don't know what fruit CAN BE, I must admit.  The melon
+was a foretaste of paradise, and the grapes made one's fingers as
+sticky as honey, and had a muscat fragrance quite inconceivable.
+They looked like amber eggs.  The best of it is, too, that in this
+climate stomach-aches are not.  We all eat grapes, peaches, and
+figs, all day long.  Old Klein sends me, for my own daily
+consumption, about thirty peaches, three pounds of grapes, and
+apples, pears, and figs besides--'just a little taste of fruits';
+only here they will pick it all unripe.
+
+February 19th.--The post came in late last night, and old Klein
+kindly sent me my letters at near midnight.  The post goes out this
+evening, and the hot wind is blowing, so I can only write to you,
+and a line to my mother.  I feel really better now.  I think the
+constant eating of grapes has done me much good.
+
+The Dutch cart-owner was so extortionate, that I am going to wait a
+few days, and write to my dear Malay to come up and drive me back.
+It is better than having to fight the Dutch monopolist in every
+village, and getting drunken drivers and bad carts after all.  I
+shall go round all the same.  The weather has been beautiful; to-
+day there is a wind, which comes about two or three times in the
+year:  it is not depressing, but hot, and a bore, because one must
+shut every window or be stifled with dust.
+
+The people are burning the veld all about, and the lurid smoke by
+day and flaming hill-sides by night are very striking.  The ashes
+of the Bosh serve as manure for the young grass, which will sprout
+in the autumn rains.  Such nights!  Such a moon!  I walk out after
+dark when it is mild and clear, and can read any print by the
+moonlight, and see the distant landscape as well as by day.
+
+Old Klein has just sent me a haunch of bok, and the skin and hoofs,
+which are pretty.
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII
+
+
+
+Caledon, Sunday.
+
+You must have fallen into second childhood to think of PRINTING
+such rambling hasty scrawls as I write.  I never could write a good
+letter; and unless I gallop as hard as I can, and don't stop to
+think, I can say nothing; so all is confused and unconnected:  only
+I fancy YOU will be amused by some of my 'impressions'.  I have
+written to my mother an accurate account of my health.  I am
+dressed and out of doors never later than six, now the weather
+makes it possible.  It is surprising how little sleep one wants.  I
+go to bed at ten and often am up at four.
+
+I made friends here the other day with a lively dried-up little old
+Irishman, who came out at seven years old a pauper-boy.  He has
+made a fortune by 'going on Togt' (German, Tausch), as thus; he
+charters two waggons, twelve oxen each, and two Hottentots to each
+waggon, leader and driver.  The waggons he fills with cotton,
+hardware, &c., &c.--an ambulatory village 'shop',--and goes about
+fifteen miles a day, on and on, into the far interior, swapping
+baftas (calico), punjums (loose trowsers), and voerschitz (cotton
+gownpieces), pronounced 'foossy', against oxen and sheep.  When all
+is gone he swaps his waggons against more oxen and a horse, and he
+and his four 'totties' drive home the spoil; and he has doubled or
+trebled his venture.  En route home, each day they kill a sheep,
+and eat it ALL.  'What!' says I; 'the whole?'  'Every bit.  I
+always take one leg and the liver for myself, and the totties roast
+the rest, and melt all the fat and entrails down in an iron pot and
+eat it with a wooden spoon.'  Je n'en revenais pas.  'What! the
+whole leg and liver at one meal?'  'Every bit; ay, and you'd do the
+same, ma'am, if you were there.'  No bread, no salt, no nothing--
+mutton and water.  The old fellow was quite poetic and heroic in
+describing the joys and perils of Togt.  I said I should like to go
+too; and he bewailed having settled a year ago in a store at
+Swellendam, 'else he'd ha' fitted up a waggon all nice and snug for
+me, and shown me what going on togt was like.  Nothing like it for
+the health, ma'am; and beautiful shooting.'  My friend had 700l. in
+gold in a carpet bag, without a lock, lying about on the stoep.
+'All right; nobody steals money or such like here.  I'm going to
+pay bills in Capetown.'
+
+Tell my mother that a man would get from 2l. to 4l. a month wages,
+with board, lodging, &c., all found, and his wife from 1l. 10s. to
+2l. a month and everything found, according to abilities and
+testimonials.  Wages are enormous, and servants at famine price;
+emigrant ships are CLEARED OFF in three days, and every ragged
+Irish girl in place somewhere.  Four pounds a month, and food for
+self, husband, and children, is no uncommon pay for a good cook;
+and after all her cookery may be poor enough.  My landlady at
+Capetown gave that.  The housemaid had ONLY 1l. 5s. a month, but
+told me herself she had taken 8l. in one week in 'tips'.  She was
+an excellent servant.  Up country here the wages are less, but the
+comfort greater, and the chances of 'getting on' much increased.
+But I believe Algoa Bay or Grahamstown are by far the best fields
+for new colonists, and (I am assured) the best climate for lung
+diseases.  The wealthy English merchants of Port Elizabeth (Algoa
+Bay) pay best.  It seems to me, as far as I can learn, that every
+really WORKING man or woman can thrive here.
+
+My German host at Houw Hoek came out twenty-three years ago, he
+told me, without a 'heller', and is now the owner of cattle and
+land and horses to a large amount.  But then the Germans work,
+while the Dutch dawdle and the English drink.  'New wine' is a
+penny a glass (half a pint), enough to blow your head off, and
+'Cape smoke' (brandy, like vitriol) ninepence a bottle--that is the
+real calamity.  If the Cape had the grape disease as badly as
+Madeira, it would be the making of the colony.
+
+I received a message from my Malay friends, Abdool Jemaalee and
+Betsy, anxious to know 'if the Misses had good news of her
+children, for bad news would make her sick'.  Old Betsy and I used
+to prose about young Abdurrachman and his studies at Mecca, and
+about my children, with more real heartiness than you can fancy.
+We were not afraid of boring each other; and pious old Abdool sat
+and nodded and said, 'May Allah protect them all!' as a refrain;--
+'Allah, il Allah!'
+
+
+
+LETTER IX
+
+
+
+Caledon, Feb. 21st.
+
+This morning's post brought your packet, and the announcement of an
+extra mail to-night--so I can send you a P.S.  I hear that Capetown
+has been pestilential, and as hot as Calcutta.  It is totally
+undrained, and the Mozambiquers are beginning to object to acting
+as scavengers to each separate house.  The 'vidanges' are more
+barbarous even than in Paris.  Without the south-easter (or 'Cape
+doctor') they must have fevers, &c.; and though too rough a
+practitioner for me, he benefits the general health.  Next month
+the winds abate, but last week an omnibus was blown over on the
+Rondebosch road, which is the most sheltered spot, and inhabited by
+Capetown merchants.  I have received all the Saturday Reviews quite
+safe, likewise the books, Mendelssohn's letters, and the novel.  I
+have written for my dear Choslullah to fetch me.  The Dutch farmers
+don't know how to charge enough; moreover, the Hottentot drivers
+get drunk, and for two lone women that is not the thing.  I pay my
+gentle Malay thirty shillings a day, which, for a cart and four and
+such a jewel of a driver, is not outrageous; and I had better pay
+that for the few days I wait on the road, than risk bad carts,
+tipsy Hottentots, and extortionate boers.
+
+This intermediate country between the 'Central African wilderness'
+and Capetown has been little frequented.  I went to the Church
+Mission School with the English clergyman yesterday.  You know I
+don't believe in every kind of missionaries, but I do believe that,
+in these districts, kind, judicious English clergymen are of great
+value.  The Dutch pastors still remember the distinction between
+'Christenmenschen' and 'Hottentoten'; but the Church Mission
+Schools teach the Anglican Catechism to every child that will
+learn, and the congregation is as piebald as Harlequin's jacket.  A
+pretty, coloured lad, about eleven years old, answered my questions
+in geography with great quickness and some wit.  I said, 'Show me
+the country you belong to.'  He pointed to England, and when I
+laughed, to the cape.  'This is where we are, but that is the
+country I BELONG TO.'  I asked him how we were governed, and he
+answered quite right.  'How is the Cape governed?'  'Oh, we have a
+Parliament too, and Mr. Silberbauer is the man WE send.'  Boys and
+girls of all ages were mixed, but no blacks.  I don't think they
+will learn, except on compulsion, as at Gnadenthal.
+
+I regret to say that Bill's wife has broken his head with a bottle,
+at the end of the honeymoon.  I fear the innovation of being
+MARRIED AT CHURCH has not had a good effect, and that his
+neighbours may quote Mr. Peachum.
+
+I was offered a young lion yesterday, but I hardly think it would
+be an agreeable addition to the household at Esher.
+
+I hear that Worcester, Paarl, and Stellenbosch are beautiful, and
+the road very desolate and grand:  one mountain pass takes six
+hours to cross.  I should not return to Capetown so early, but poor
+Captain J- has had his leg smashed and amputated, so I must look
+out for myself in the matter of ships.  Whenever it is hot, I am
+well, for the heat here is so LIGHT and dry.  The wind tries me,
+but we have little here compared to the coast.  I hope that the
+voyage home will do me still more good; but I will not sail till
+April, so as to arrive in June.  May, in the Channel, would not do.
+
+How I wish I could send you the fruit now on my table--amber-
+coloured grapes, yellow waxen apples streaked with vermillion in
+fine little lines, huge peaches, and tiny green figs!  I must send
+dear old Klein a little present from England, to show that I don't
+forget my Dutch adorer.  I wish I could bring you the 'Biltong ' he
+sent me--beef or bok dried in the sun in strips, and slightly
+salted; you may carry enough in your pocket to live on for a
+fortnight, and it is very good as a little 'relish'.  The
+partridges also have been welcome, and we shall eat the tiny haunch
+of bok to-day.
+
+Mrs. D- is gone to Capetown to get servants (the Scotch girl having
+carried on her amours too flagrantly), and will return in my cart.
+S- is still keeping house meanwhile, much perturbed by the placid
+indolence of the brown girl.  The stableman cooks, and very well
+too.  This is colonial life--a series of makeshifts and
+difficulties; but the climate is fine, people feel well and make
+money, and I think it is not an unhappy life.  I have been most
+fortunate in my abode, and can say, without speaking cynically,
+that I have found 'my warmest welcome at an inn'.  Mine host is a
+rough soldier, but the very soul of good nature and good feeling;
+and his wife is a very nice person--so cheerful, clever, and
+kindhearted.
+
+I should like to bring home the little Madagascar girl from
+Rathfelders, or a dear little mulatto who nurses a brown baby here,
+and is so clean and careful and 'pretty behaved',--but it would be
+a great risk.  The brown babies are ravishing--so fat and jolly and
+funny.
+
+One great charm of the people here is, that no one expects money or
+gifts, and that all civility is gratis.  Many a time I finger small
+coin secretly in my pocket, and refrain from giving it, for fear of
+spoiling this innocence.  I have not once seen a LOOK implying
+'backsheesh', and begging is unknown.  But the people are reserved
+and silent, and have not the attractive manners of the darkies of
+Capetown and the neighbourhood.
+
+
+
+LETTER X
+
+
+
+Caledon, Feb. 22d.
+
+Yesterday Captain D- gave me a very nice caross of blessbok skins,
+which he got from some travelling trader.  The excellence of the
+Caffre skin-dressing and sewing is, I fancy, unequalled; the bok-
+skins are as soft as a kid glove, and have no smell at all.
+
+In the afternoon the young doctor drove me, in his little gig-cart
+and pair (the lightest and swiftest of conveyances), to see a wine-
+farm.  The people were not at work, but we saw the tubs and vats,
+and drank 'most'.  The grapes are simply trodden by a Hottentot, in
+a tub with a sort of strainer at the bottom, and then thrown--
+skins, stalks, and all--into vats, where the juice ferments for
+twice twenty-four hours; after which it is run into casks, which
+are left with the bung out for eight days; then the wine is drawn
+off into another cask, a little sulphur and brandy are added to it,
+and it is bunged down.  Nothing can be conceived so barbarous.  I
+have promised Mr. M- to procure and send him an exact account of
+the process in Spain.  It might be a real service to a most worthy
+and amiable man.  Dr. M- also would be glad of a copy.  They
+literally know nothing about wine-making here, and with such
+matchless grapes I am sure it ought to be good.  Altogether, 'der
+alte Schlendrian' prevails at the Cape to an incredible degree.
+
+If two 'Heeren M-' call on you, please be civil to them.  I don't
+know them personally, but their brother is the doctor here, and the
+most good-natured young fellow I ever saw.  If I were returning by
+Somerset instead of Worcester, I might put up at their parents'
+house and be sure of a welcome; and I can tell you civility to
+strangers is by no means of course here.  I don't wonder at it; for
+the old Dutch families ARE GENTLEFOLKS of the good dull old school,
+and the English colonists can scarcely suit them.  In the few
+instances in which I have succeeded in thawing a Dutchman, I have
+found him wonderfully good-natured; and the different manner in
+which I was greeted when in company with the young doctor showed
+the feeling at once.  The dirt of a Dutch house is not to be
+conceived.  I have had sights in bedrooms in very respectable
+houses which I dare not describe.  The coloured people are just as
+clean.  The young doctor (who is much Anglicised) tells me that, in
+illness, he has to break the windows in the farmhouses--they are
+built not to open!  The boers are below the English in manners and
+intelligence, and hate them for their 'go-ahead' ways, though THEY
+seem slow enough to me.  As to drink, I fancy it is six of one and
+half a dozen of the other; but the English are more given to
+eternal drams, and the Dutch to solemn drinking bouts.  I can't
+understand either, in this climate, which is so stimulating, that I
+more often drink ginger-beer or water than wine--a bottle of sherry
+lasted me a fortnight, though I was ordered to drink it; somehow, I
+had no mind to it.
+
+27th.--The cart could not be got till the day before yesterday, and
+yesterday Mrs. D- arrived in it with two new Irish maids; it saved
+her 3l., and I must have paid equally.  The horses were very tired,
+having been hard at work carrying Malays all the week to Constantia
+and back, on a pilgrimage to the tomb of a Mussulman saint; so to-
+day they rest, and to-morrow I go to Villiersdorp.  Choslullah has
+been appointed driver of a post-cart; he tried hard to be allowed
+to pay a remplacant, and to fetch 'his missis', but was refused
+leave; and so a smaller and blacker Malay has come, whom Choslullah
+threatened to curse heavily if he failed to take great care of 'my
+missis' and be a 'good boy'.  Ramadan begins on Sunday, and my poor
+driver can't even prepare for it by a good feast, as no fowls are
+to be had here just now, and he can't eat profanely-killed meat.
+Some pious Christian has tried to burn a Mussulman martyr's tomb at
+Eerste River, and there were fears the Malays might indulge in a
+little revenge; but they keep quiet.  I am to go with my driver to
+eat some of the feast (of Bairam, is it not?) at his priest's when
+Ramadan ends, if I am in Capetown, and also am asked to a wedding
+at a relation of Choslullah's.  It was quite a pleasure to hear the
+kindly Mussulman talk, after these silent Hottentots.  The Malays
+have such agreeable manners; so civil, without the least cringing
+or Indian obsequiousness.  I dare say they can be very 'insolent'
+on provocation; but I have always found among them manners like
+old-fashioned French ones, but quieter; and they have an
+affectionate way of saying 'MY missis' when they know one, which is
+very nice to hear.  It is getting quite chilly here already; COLD
+night and morning; and I shall be glad to descend off this plateau
+into the warmer regions of Worcester, &c.  I have just bought EIGHT
+splendid ostrich feathers for 1l. of my old Togthandler friend.  In
+England they would cost from eighteen to twenty-five shillings
+each.  I have got a reebok and a klipspringer skin for you; the
+latter makes a saddle-cloth which defies sore backs; they were
+given me by Klein and a farmer at Palmiet River.  The flesh was
+poor stuff, white and papery.  The Hottentots can't 'bray' the
+skins as the Caffres do; and the woman who did mine asked me for a
+trifle beforehand, and got so drunk that she let them dry halfway
+in the process, consequently they don't look so well.
+
+Worcester, Sunday, March 2d.
+
+Oh, such a journey!  Such country!  Pearly mountains and deep blue
+sky, and an impassable pass to walk down, and baboons, and
+secretary birds, and tortoises!  I couldn't sleep for it all last
+night, tired as I was with the unutterably bad road, or track
+rather.
+
+Well, we left Caledon on Friday, at ten o'clock, and though the
+weather had been cold and unpleasant for two days, I had a lovely
+morning, and away we went to Villiersdorp (pronounced Filjeesdorp).
+It is quite a tiny village, in a sort of Rasselas-looking valley.
+We were four hours on the road, winding along the side of a
+mountain ridge, which we finally crossed, with a splendid view of
+the sea at the far-distant end of a huge amphitheatre formed by two
+ridges of mountains, and on the other side the descent into
+Filjeesdorp.  The whole way we saw no human being or habitation,
+except one shepherd, from the time we passed Buntje's kraal, about
+two miles out of Caledon.  The little drinking-shop would not hold
+travellers, so I went to the house of the storekeeper (as the
+clergyman of Caledon had told me I might), and found a most kind
+reception.  Our host was English, an old man-of-war's man, with a
+gentle, kindly Dutch wife, and the best-mannered children I have
+seen in the colony.  They gave us clean comfortable beds and a good
+dinner, and wine ten years in the cellar; in short, the best of
+hospitality.  I made an effort to pay for the entertainment next
+morning, when, after a good breakfast, we started loaded with
+fruit, but the kind people would not hear of it, and bid me good-
+bye like old friends.  At the end of the valley we went a little
+up-hill, and then found ourselves at the top of a pass down into
+the level below.  S- and I burst out with one voice, 'How
+beautiful!'  Sabaal, our driver, thought the exclamation was an
+ironical remark on the road, which, indeed, appeared to be
+exclusively intended for goats.  I suggested walking down, to
+which, for a wonder, the Malay agreed.  I was really curious to see
+him get down with two wheels and four horses, where I had to lay
+hold from time to time in walking.  The track was excessively
+steep, barely wide enough, and as slippery as a flagstone pavement,
+being the naked mountain-top, which is bare rock.  However, all
+went perfectly right.
+
+How shall I describe the view from that pass?  In front was a long,
+long level valley, perhaps three to five miles broad (I can't judge
+distance in this atmosphere; a house that looks a quarter of a mile
+off is two miles distant).  At the extreme end, in a little gap
+between two low brown hills that crossed each other, one could just
+see Worcester--five hours' drive off.  Behind it, and on each side
+the plain, mountains of every conceivable shape and colour; the
+strangest cliffs and peaks and crags toppling every way, and tinged
+with all the colours of opal; chiefly delicate, pale lilac and
+peach colour, but varied with red brown and Titian green.  In spite
+of the drought, water sparkled on the mountain-sides in little
+glittering threads, and here and there in the plain; and pretty
+farms were dotted on either side at the very bottom of the slopes
+toward the mountain-foot.  The sky of such a blue! (it is deeper
+now by far than earlier in the year).  In short, I never did see
+anything so beautiful.  It even surpassed Hottentot's Holland.  On
+we went, straight along the valley, crossing drift after drift;--a
+drift is the bed of a stream more or less dry; in which sometimes
+you are drowned, sometimes only POUNDED, as was our hap.  The track
+was incredibly bad, except for short bits, where ironstone
+prevailed.  However, all went well, and on the road I chased and
+captured a pair of remarkably swift and handsome little
+'Schelpats'.  That you may duly appreciate such a feat of valour
+and activity, I will inform you that their English name is
+'tortoise'.  On the strength of this effort, we drank a bottle of
+beer, as it was very hot and sandy; and our Malay was a WET enough
+Mussulman to take his full share in a modest way, though he
+declined wine or 'Cape smoke Soopjes' (drams) with aversion.  No
+sooner had we got under weigh again, than Sabaal pulled up and
+said, 'There ARE the Baviaans Missis want to see!' and so they
+were.  At some distance by the river was a great brute, bigger than
+a Newfoundland dog, stalking along with the hideous baboon walk,
+and tail vehemently cocked up; a troop followed at a distance,
+hiding and dodging among the palmiets.  They were evidently en
+route to rob a garden close to them, and had sent a great stout
+fellow ahead to reconnoitre.  'He see Missis, and feel sure she not
+got a gun; if man come on horseback, you see 'em run like devil.'
+We had not that pleasure, and left them, on felonious thoughts
+intent.
+
+The road got more and more beautiful as we neared Worcester, and
+the mountains grew higher and craggier.  Presently, a huge bird,
+like a stork on the wing, pounced down close by us.  He was a
+secretary-bird, and had caught sight of a snake.  We passed 'Brant
+Vley' (burnt or hot spring), where sulphur-water bubbles up in a
+basin some thirty feet across and ten or twelve deep.  The water is
+clear as crystal, and is hot enough just NOT to boil an egg, I was
+told.  At last, one reaches the little gap between the brown hills
+which one has seen for four hours, and drives through it into a
+wide, wide flat, with still craggier and higher mountains all
+round, and Worcester in front at the foot of a towering cliff.  The
+town is not so pretty, to my taste, as the little villages.  The
+streets are too wide, and the market-place too large, which always
+looks dreary, but the houses and gardens individually are charming.
+Our inn is a very nice handsome old Dutch house; but we have got
+back to 'civilization', and the horrid attempts at 'style' which
+belong to Capetown.  The landlord and lady are too genteel to
+appear at all, and the Hottentots, who are disguised, according to
+their sexes, in pantry jacket and flounced petticoat, don't
+understand a word of English or of real Dutch.  At Gnadenthal they
+understood Dutch, and spoke it tolerably; but here, as in most
+places, it is three-parts Hottentot; and then they affect to
+understand English, and bring everything wrong, and are sulky:  but
+the rooms are very comfortable.  The change of climate is complete-
+-the summer was over at Caledon, and here we are into it again--the
+most delicious air one can conceive; it must have been a perfect
+oven six weeks ago.  The birds are singing away merrily still; the
+approach of autumn does not silence them here.  The canaries have a
+very pretty song, like our linnet, only sweeter; the rest are very
+inferior to ours.  The sugar-bird is delicious when close by, but
+his pipe is too soft to be heard at any distance.
+
+To those who think voyages and travels tiresome, my delight in the
+new birds and beasts and people must seem very stupid.  I can't
+help it if it does, and am not ashamed to confess that I feel the
+old sort of enchanted wonder with which I used to read Cook's
+voyages, and the like, as a child.  It is very coarse and
+unintellectual of me; but I would rather see this now, at my age,
+than Italy; the fresh, new, beautiful nature is a second youth--or
+CHILDHOOD--si vous voulez.  To-morrow we shall cross the highest
+pass I have yet crossed, and sleep at Paarl--then Stellenbosch,
+then Capetown.  For any one OUT of health, and IN pocket, I should
+certainly prescribe the purchase of a waggon and team of six
+horses, and a long, slow progress in South Africa.  One cannot walk
+in the midday sun, but driving with a very light roof over one's
+head is quite delicious.  When I looked back upon my dreary, lonely
+prison at Ventnor, I wondered I had survived it at all.
+
+Capetown, March 7th.
+
+After writing last, we drove out, on Sunday afternoon, to a deep
+alpine valley, to see a NEW BRIDGE--a great marvel apparently.  The
+old Spanish Joe Miller about selling the bridge to buy water
+occurred to me, and made Sabaal laugh immensely.  The Dutch farmers
+were tearing home from Kerk, in their carts--well-dressed,
+prosperous-looking folks, with capital horses.  Such lovely farms,
+snugly nestled in orange and pomegranate groves!  It is of no use
+to describe this scenery; it is always mountains, and always
+beautiful opal mountains; quite without the gloom of European
+mountain scenery.  The atmosphere must make the charm.  I hear that
+an English traveller went the same journey and found all barren
+from Dan to Beersheba.  I'm sorry for him.
+
+In the morning of Sunday, early, I walked along the road with
+Sabaal, and saw a picture I shall never forget.  A little Malabar
+girl had just been bathing in the Sloot, and had put her scanty
+shift on her lovely little wet brown body; she stood in the water
+with the drops glittering on her brown skin and black, satin hair,
+the perfection of youthful loveliness--a naiad of ten years old.
+When the shape and features are PERFECT, as hers were, the coffee-
+brown shows it better than our colour, on account of its perfect
+EVENNESS--like the dead white of marble.  I shall never forget her
+as she stood playing with the leaves of the gum-tree which hung
+over her, and gazing with her glorious eyes so placidly.
+
+On Monday morning, I walked off early to the old Drosdy
+(Landdrost's house), found an old gentleman, who turned out to be
+the owner, and who asked me my name and all the rest of the Dutch
+'litanei' of questions, and showed me the pretty old Dutch garden
+and the house--a very handsome one.  I walked back to breakfast,
+and thought Worcester the prettiest place I had ever seen.  We then
+started for Paarl, and drove through 'Bain's Kloof', a splendid
+mountain-pass, four hours' long, constant driving.  It was
+glorious, but more like what one had seen in pictures--a deep,
+narrow gorge, almost dark in places, and, to my mind, lacked the
+BEAUTY of the yesterday's drive, though it is, perhaps, grander;
+but the view which bursts on one at the top, and the descent,
+winding down the open mountain-side, is too fine to describe.
+Table Mountain, like a giant's stronghold, seen far distant, with
+an immense plain, half fertile, half white sand; to the left,
+Wagenmaker's Vley; and further on, the Paarl lying scattered on the
+slope of a mountain topped with two DOMES, just the shape of the
+cup which Lais (wasn't it?) presented to the temple of Venus,
+moulded on her breast.  The horses were tired, so we stopped at
+Waggon-maker's Valley (or Wellington, as the English try to get it
+called), and found ourselves in a true Flemish village, and under
+the roof of a jolly Dutch hostess, who gave us divine coffee and
+bread-and-butter, which seemed ambrosia after being deprived of
+those luxuries for almost three months.  Also new milk in
+abundance, besides fruit of all kinds in vast heaps, and
+pomegranates off the tree.  I asked her to buy me a few to take in
+the cart, and got a 'muid', the third of a sack, for a shilling,
+with a bill, 'U bekomt 1 muid 28 granaeten dat Kostet 1s.'  The old
+lady would walk out with me and take me into the shops, to show the
+'vrow uit Engelland' to her friends.  It was a lovely place,
+intensely hot, all glowing with sunshine.  Then the sun went down,
+and the high mountains behind us were precisely the colour of a
+Venice ruby glass--really, truly, and literally;--not purple, not
+crimson, but glowing ruby-red--and the quince-hedges and orange-
+trees below looked INTENSELY green, and the houses snow-white.  It
+was a transfiguration--no less.
+
+I saw Hottentots again, four of them, from some remote corner, so
+the race is not quite extinct.  These were youngish, two men and
+two women, quite light yellow, not darker than Europeans, and with
+little tiny black knots of wool scattered over their heads at
+intervals.  They are hideous in face, but exquisitely shaped--very,
+very small though.  One of the men was drunk, poor wretch, and
+looked the picture of misery.  You can see the fineness of their
+senses by the way in which they dart their glances and prick their
+ears.  Every one agrees that, when tamed, they make the best of
+servants--gentle, clever, and honest; but the penny-a-glass wine
+they can't resist, unless when caught and tamed young.  They work
+in the fields, or did so as long as any were left; but even here, I
+was told, it was a wonder to see them.
+
+We went on through the Paarl, a sweet pretty place, reminding one
+vaguely of Bonchurch, and still through fine mountains, with Scotch
+firs growing like Italian stone pines, and farms, and vineyard upon
+vineyard.  At Stellenbosch we stopped.  I had been told it was the
+prettiest town in the colony, and it IS very pretty, with oak-trees
+all along the street, like those at Paarl and Wagenmakkers Vley;
+but I was disappointed.  It was less beautiful than what I had
+seen.  Besides, the evening was dull and cold.  The south-easter
+greeted us here, and I could not go out all the afternoon.  The inn
+was called 'Railway Hotel', and kept by low coarse English people,
+who gave us a filthy dinner, dirty sheets, and an atrocious
+breakfast, and charged 1l. 3s. 6d. for the same meals and time as
+old Vrow Langfeldt had charged 12s. for, and had given civility,
+cleanliness, and abundance of excellent food;--besides which, she
+fed Sabaal gratis, and these people fleeced him as they did me.
+So, next morning, we set off, less pleasantly disposed, for
+Capetown, over the flat, which is dreary enough, and had a horrid
+south-easter.  We started early, and got in before the wind became
+a hurricane, which it did later.  We were warmly welcomed by Mrs.
+R-; and here I am in my old room, looking over the beautiful bay,
+quite at home again.  It blew all yesterday, and having rather a
+sore-throat I stayed in bed, and to-day is all bright and
+beautiful.  But Capetown looks murky after Caledon and Worcester;
+there is, to my eyes, quite a haze over the mountains, and they
+look far off and indistinct.  All is comparative in this world,
+even African skies.  At Caledon, the most distant mountains, as far
+as your eye can reach, look as clear in every detail as the map on
+your table--an appearance utterly new to European eyes.
+
+I gave Sabaal 1l. for his eight days' service as driver, as a
+Drinkgelt, and the worthy fellow was in ecstasies of gratitude.
+Next morning early, he appeared with a present of bananas, and his
+little girl dressed from head to foot in brand-new clothes, bought
+out of my money, with her wool screwed up extremely tight in little
+knots on her black little head (evidently her mother is the
+blackest of Caffres or Mozambiques).  The child looked like a
+Caffre, and her father considers her quite a pearl.  I had her in,
+and admired the little thing loud enough for him to hear outside,
+as I lay in bed.  You see, I too was to have my share in the
+pleasure of the new clothes.  This readiness to believe that one
+will sympathize with them, is very pleasing in the Malays.
+
+March 15.
+
+I went to see my old Malay friends and to buy a water-melon.  They
+were in all the misery of Ramadan.  Betsy and pretty Nassirah very
+thin and miserable, and the pious old Abdool sitting on a little
+barrel waiting for 'gun-fire'--i.e. sunset, to fall to on the
+supper which old Betsy was setting out.  He was silent, and the
+corners of his mouth were drawn down just like -'s at an evening
+party.
+
+I shall go to-morrow to bid the T-s good-bye, at Wynberg.  I was to
+have spent a few days there, but Wynberg is cold at night and
+dampish, so I declined that.  She is a nice woman--Irish, and so
+innocent and frank and well-bred.  She has been at Cold Bokke Veld,
+and shocked her puritanical host by admiring the naked Caffres who
+worked on his farm.  He wanted them to wear clothes.
+
+We have been amused by the airs of a naval captain and his wife,
+who are just come here.  They complained that the merchant-service
+officers spoke FAMILIARLY to their children on board.  Quel audace!
+When I think of the excellent, modest, manly young fellows who
+talked very familiarly and pleasantly to me on board the St.
+Lawrence, I long to reprimand these foolish people.
+
+Friday, 21st.--I am just come from prayer, at the Mosque in
+Chiappini Street, on the outskirts of the town.  A most striking
+sight.  A large room, like a county ball-room, with glass
+chandeliers, carpeted with common carpet, all but a space at the
+entrance, railed off for shoes; the Caaba and pulpit at one end;
+over the niche, a crescent painted; and over the entrance door a
+crescent, an Arabic inscription, and the royal arms of England!  A
+fat jolly Mollah looked amazed as I ascended the steps; but when I
+touched my forehead and said, 'Salaam Aleikoom', he laughed and
+said, 'Salaam, Salaam, come in, come in.'  The faithful poured in,
+all neatly dressed in their loose drab trousers, blue jackets, and
+red handkerchiefs on their heads; they left their wooden clogs in
+company, with my shoes, and proceeded, as it appeared, to strip.
+Off went jackets, waistcoats, and trousers, with the dexterity of a
+pantomime transformation; the red handkerchief was replaced by a
+white skullcap, and a long large white shirt and full white drawers
+flowed around them.  How it had all been stuffed into the trim
+jacket and trousers, one could not conceive.  Gay sashes and
+scarves were pulled out of a little bundle in a clean silk
+handkerchief, and a towel served as prayer-carpet.  In a moment the
+whole scene was as oriental as if the Hansom cab I had come in
+existed no more.  Women suckled their children, and boys played
+among the clogs and shoes all the time, and I sat on the floor in a
+remote corner.  The chanting was very fine, and the whole ceremony
+very decorous and solemn.  It lasted an hour; and then the little
+heaps of garments were put on, and the congregation dispersed, each
+man first laying a penny on a very curious little old Dutch-
+looking, heavy, iron-bound chest, which stood in the middle of the
+room.
+
+I have just heard that the post closes to-night and must say
+farewell--a rivederci.
+
+
+
+LETTER XI
+
+
+
+Capetown, March 20th.
+
+Dearest mother,
+
+Dr. Shea says he fears I must not winter in England yet, but that I
+am greatly improved--as, indeed, I could tell him.  He is another
+of the kind 'sea doctors' I have met with; he came all the way from
+Simon's Bay to see me, and then said, 'What nonsense is that?' when
+I offered him a fee.  This is a very nice place up in the
+'gardens', quite out of the town and very comfortable.  But I
+regret Caledon.  A- will show you my account of my beautiful
+journey back.  Worcester is a fairy-land; and then to catch
+tortoises walking about, and to see 'baviaans', and snakes and
+secretary birds eating them! and then people have the impudence to
+think I must have been 'very dull!'  Sie merken's nicht, that it is
+THEY who are dull.
+
+Dear Dr. Hawtrey! he must have died just as I was packing up the
+first Caffre Testament for him!  I felt his death very much, in
+connexion with my father; their regard for each other was an honour
+to both.  I have the letter he wrote me on J-'s marriage, and a
+charming one it is.
+
+I took Mrs. A- a drive in a Hansom cab to-day out to Wynberg, to
+see my friends Captain and Mrs. T-, who have a cottage under Table
+Mountain in a spot like the best of St. George's Hill.  Very dull
+too; but as she is really a lady, it suits her, and Capetown does
+not.  I was to have stayed with them, but Wynberg is cold at night.
+Poor B-'s wife is very ill and won't leave Capetown for a day.  The
+people here are wunderlich for that.  A lady born here, and with
+7,000l. a year, has never been further than Stellenbosch, about
+twenty miles.  I am asked how I lived and what I ate during my
+little excursion, as if I had been to Lake Ngami.  If only I had
+known how easy it all is, I would have gone by sea to East London
+and seen the Knysna and George district, and the primaeval African
+forest, the yellow wood, and other giant trees.  However, 'For what
+I have received,' &c., &c.  No one can conceive what it is, after
+two years of prison and utter languor, to stand on the top of a
+mountain pass, and enjoy physical existence for a few hours at a
+time.  I felt as if it was quite selfish to enjoy anything so much
+when you were all so anxious about me at home; but as that is the
+best symptom of all, I do not repent.
+
+S- has been an excellent travelling servant, and really a better
+companion than many more educated people; for she is always amused
+and curious, and is friendly with the coloured people.  She is
+quite recovered.  It is a wonderful climate--sans que cela
+paraisse.  It feels chilly and it blows horridly, and does not seem
+genial, but it gives new life.
+
+To-morrow I am going with old Abdool Jemaalee to prayers at the
+Mosque, and shall see a school kept by a Malay priest.  It is now
+Ramadan,. and my Muslim friends are very thin and look glum.
+Choslullah sent a message to ask, 'Might he see the Missis once
+more?  He should pray all the time she was on the sea.'  Some pious
+Christians here would expect such horrors to sink the ship.  I
+can't think why Mussulmans are always gentlemen; the Malay coolies
+have a grave courtesy which contrasts most strikingly with both
+European vulgarity and negro jollity.  It is very curious, for they
+only speak Dutch, and know nothing of oriental manners.  I fear I
+shall not see the Walkers again.  Simon's Bay is too far to go and
+come in a day, as one cannot go out before ten or eleven, and must
+be in by five or half-past.  Those hours are gloriously bright and
+hot, but morning and night are cold.
+
+I am so happy in the thought of sailing now so very soon and seeing
+you all again, that I can settle to nothing for five minutes.  I
+now feel how anxious and uneasy I have been, and how I shall
+rejoice to get home.  I shall leave a letter for A-, to go in
+April, and tell him and you what ship I am in.  I shall choose the
+SLOWEST, so as not to reach England and face the Channel before
+June, if possible.  So don't be alarmed if I do not arrive till
+late in June.  Till then good-bye, and God bless you, dearest
+mother--Auf frohes Wiedersehn.
+
+
+
+LETTER XII
+
+
+
+Capetown, Sunday, March 23d.
+
+It has been a REAL hot day, and threatened an earthquake and a
+thunderstorm; but nothing has come of it beyond sheet lightning to-
+night, which is splendid over the bay, and looks as if repeated in
+a grand bush-fire on the hills opposite.  The sunset was glorious.
+That rarest of insects, the praying mantis, has just dropped upon
+my paper.  I am thankful that, not being an entomologist, I am
+dispensed from the sacred duty of impaling the lovely green
+creature who sits there, looking quite wise and human.  Fussy
+little brown beetles, as big as two lady-birds, keep flying into my
+eyes, and the musquitoes are rejoicing loudly in the prospect of a
+feast.  You will understand by this that both windows are wide open
+into the great verandah,--very unusual in this land of cold nights.
+
+April 4th.--I have been trying in vain to get a passage home.  The
+Camperdown has not come.  In short, I am waiting for a chance
+vessel, and shall pack up now and be ready to go on board at a
+day's notice.
+
+I went on the last evening of Ramadan to the Mosque, having heard
+there was a grand 'function'; but there were only little boys lying
+about on the floor, some on their stomachs, some on their backs,
+higgledy-piggledy (if it be not profane to apply the phrase to
+young Islam), all shouting their prayers a tue tete.  Priests, men,
+women, and English crowded in and out in the exterior division.
+The English behaved a l'Anglaise--pushed each other, laughed,
+sneered, and made a disgusting display of themselves.  I asked a
+stately priest, in a red turban, to explain the affair to me, and
+in a few minutes found myself supplied by one Mollah with a chair,
+and by another with a cup of tea--was, in short, in the midst of a
+Malay soiree.  They spoke English very little, but made up for it
+by their usual good breeding and intelligence.  On Monday, I am
+going to see the school which the priest keeps at his house, and to
+'honour his house by my presence'.  The delight they show at any
+friendly interest taken in them is wonderful.  Of course, I am
+supposed to be poisoned.  A clergyman's widow here gravely asserts
+that her husband went mad THREE YEARS after drinking a cup of
+coffee handed to him by a Malay!--and in consequence of drinking
+it!  It is exactly like the mediaeval feeling about the Jews.  I
+saw that it was quite a DEMONSTRATION that I drank up the tea
+unhesitatingly.  Considering that the Malays drank it themselves,
+my courage deserves less admiration.  But it was a quaint sensation
+to sit in a Mosque, behaving as if at an evening party, in a little
+circle of poor Moslim priests.
+
+I am going to have a photograph of my cart done.  I was to have
+gone to the place to-day, but when Choslullah (whom I sent for to
+complete the picture) found out what I wanted, he implored me to
+put it off till Monday, that he might be better dressed, and was so
+unhappy at the notion of being immortalized in an old jacket, that
+I agreed to the delay.  Such a handsome fellow may be allowed a
+little vanity.
+
+The colony is torn with dissensions as to Sunday trains.  Some of
+the Dutch clergy are even more absurd than our own on that point.
+A certain Van der Lingen, at Stellenbosch, calls Europe 'one vast
+Sodom', and so forth.  There is altogether a nice kettle of
+religious hatred brewing here.  The English Bishop of Capetown
+appoints all the English clergy, and is absolute monarch of all he
+surveys; and he and his clergy are carrying matters with a high
+hand.  The Bishop's chaplain told Mrs. J- that she could not hope
+for salvation in the Dutch Church, since her clergy were not
+ordained by any bishop, and therefore they could only administer
+the sacrament 'unto damnation'.  All the physicians in a body,
+English as well as Dutch, have withdrawn from the Dispensary,
+because it was used as a means of pressure to draw the coloured
+people from the Dutch to the English Church.
+
+This High-Church tyranny cannot go on long.  Catholics there are
+few, but their bishop plays the same game; and it is a losing one.
+The Irish maid at the Caledon inn was driven by her bishop to be
+married at the Lutheran church, just as a young Englishman I know
+(though a fervent Puseyite) was driven to be married at the Scotch
+kirk.  The colonial bishops are despots in their own churches, and
+there is no escape from their tyranny but by dissent.  The Admiral
+and his family have been anathematized for going to a fancy bazaar
+given by the Wesleyans for their chapel.
+
+April 8th.--Yesterday, I failed about my cart photograph.  First,
+the owner had sent away the cart, and when Choslullah came dressed
+in all his best clothes, with a lovely blue handkerchief setting
+off his beautiful orange-tawny face, he had to rush off to try to
+borrow another cart.  As ill luck would have it, he met a 'serious
+young man', with no front teeth, and a hideous wen on his eyebrow,
+who informed the priest of Choslullah's impious purpose, and came
+with him to see that he did NOT sit for his portrait.  I believe it
+was half envy; for my handsome driver was as pleased, and then as
+disappointed, as a young lady about her first ball, and obviously
+had no religious scruples of his own on the subject.  The weather
+is very delightful now--hot, but beautiful; and the south-easters,
+though violent, are short, and not cold.  As in all other
+countries, autumn is the best time of year.
+
+April 15th.--Your letters arrived yesterday, to my great delight.
+I have been worrying about a ship, and was very near sailing to-day
+by the Queen of the South at twenty-four hours' notice, but I have
+resolved to wait for the Camperdown.  The Queen of the South is a
+steamer,--which is odious, for they pitch the coal all over the
+lower deck, so that you breathe coal-dust for the first ten days;
+then she was crammed--only one cabin vacant, and that small, and on
+the lower deck--and fifty-two children on board.  Moreover, she
+will probably get to England too soon, so I resign myself to wait.
+The Camperdown has only upper-deck cabins, and I shall have fresh
+air.  I am not as well as I was at Caledon, so I am all the more
+anxious to have a voyage likely to do me good instead of harm.
+
+I got my cart and Choslullah photographed after all.  Choslullah
+came next day (having got rid of his pious friend), quite resolved
+that 'the Missis' should take his portrait, so I will send or bring
+a few copies of my beloved cart.  After the photograph was done, we
+drove round the Kloof, between Table and Lion Mountain.  The road
+is cut on the side of Lion Mountain, and overhangs the sea at a
+great height.  Camp Bay, which lies on the further side of the
+'Lion's Head', is most lovely; never was sea so deeply blue, rocks
+so warmly brown, or sand and foam so glittering white; and down at
+the mountain-foot the bright green of the orange and pomegranate
+trees throws it all out in greater relief.  But the atmosphere here
+won't do after that of the 'Ruggings', as the Caledon line of
+country is called.  I shall never lose the impression of the view I
+had when Dr. Morkel drove me out on a hill-side, where the view
+seemed endless and without a vestige of life; and yet in every
+valley there were farms; but it looked a vast, utter solitude, and
+without the least haze.  You don't know what that utter clearness
+means--the distinctness is quite awful.  Here it is always slightly
+hazy; very pretty and warm, but it takes off from the grandeur.  It
+is the difference between a pretty Pompadour beauty and a Greek
+statue.  Those pale opal mountains, as distinct in every detail as
+the map on your table, are so cheerful and serene; no melodramatic
+effects of clouds and gloom.  I suppose it is not really so
+beautiful as it seemed to me, for other people say it is bare and
+desolate, and certainly it is; but it seemed to me anything but
+dreary.
+
+I am persuaded that Capetown is not healthy; indeed, the town can't
+be, from its stench and dirt; but I believe the whole seashore is
+more or less bad, compared to the upper plateaux, of which I know
+only the first.  I should have gone back to Paarl, only that ships
+come and go within twenty-four hours, so one has the pleasure of
+living in constant expectation, with packed trunks, wondering when
+one shall get away.  A clever Mr. M-, who has lived ALL OVER India,
+and is going back to Singapore, with his wife and child, are now in
+the house; and some very pleasant Jews, bound for British
+Caffraria--one of them has a lovely little wife and three children.
+She is very full of Prince Albert's death, and says there was not a
+dry eye in the synagogues in London, which were all hung with black
+on the day of his funeral, and prayer went on the whole day.  'THE
+PEOPLE mourned for him as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he
+deserved it a great deal better,' was her rather unorthodox
+conclusion.  These colonial Jews are a new 'Erscheinung' to me.
+They have the features of their race, but many of their
+peculiarities are gone.  Mr. L-, who is very handsome and
+gentlemanly, eats ham and patronises a good breed of pigs on the
+'model farm' on which he spends his money.  He is (he says) a
+thorough Jew in faith, and evidently in charitable works; but he
+wants to say his prayers in English and not to 'dress himself up'
+in a veil and phylacteries for the purpose; and he and his wife
+talk of England as 'home', and care as much for Jerusalem as their
+neighbours.  They have not forgotten the old persecutions, and are
+civil to the coloured people, and speak of them in quite a
+different tone from other English colonists.  Moreover, they are
+far better mannered, and more 'HUMAN', in the German sense of the
+word, in all respects;--in short, less 'colonial'.
+
+I have bought some Cape 'confeyt'; apricots, salted and then
+sugared, called 'mebos'--delicious!  Also pickled peaches,
+'chistnee', and quince jelly.  I have a notion of some Cherupiga
+wine for ourselves.  I will inquire the cost of bottling, packing,
+&c.; it is about one shilling and fourpence a bottle here, sweet
+red wine, unlike any other I ever drank, and I think very good.  It
+is very tempting to bring a few things so unknown in England.  I
+have a glorious 'Velcombers' for you, a blanket of nine Damara
+sheepskins, sewn by the Damaras, and dressed so that moths and
+fleas won't stay near them.  It will make a grand railway rug and
+'outside car' covering.  The hunters use them for sleeping out of
+doors.  I have bought three, and a springbok caross for somebody.
+
+April 17th.--The winter has set in to-day.  It rains steadily, at
+the rate of the heaviest bit of the heaviest shower in England, and
+is as cold as a bad day early in September.  One can just sit
+without a fire.  Presently, all will be green and gay; for winter
+is here the season of flowers, and the heaths will cover the
+country with a vast Turkey carpet.  Already the green is appearing
+where all was brown yesterday.  To-day is Good Friday; and if
+Christmas seemed odd at Midsummer, Easter in autumn seems
+positively unnatural.  Our Jewish party made their exodus to-day,
+by the little coasting steamer, to Algoa Bay.  I rather condoled
+with the pretty little woman about her long rough journey, with
+three babies; but she laughed, and said they had had time to get
+used to it ever since the days of Moses.  All she grieved over was
+not being able to keep Passover, and she described their domestic
+ceremonies quite poetically.  We heard from our former housemaid,
+Annie, the other day, announcing her marriage and her sister's.
+She wrote such a pretty, merry letter to S-, saying 'the more she
+tried not to like him, the better she loved him, and had to say,
+"Aha, Annie, you're caught at last."'  A year and a half is a long
+time to remain single in this country.
+
+Monday, April 21st, Easter Monday.--The mail goes out in an hour,
+so I will just add, good-bye.  The winter is now fairly set in, and
+I long to be off.  I fear I shall have a desperately cold week or
+so at first sailing, till we catch the south-east trades.  This
+weather is beautiful in itself, but I feel it from the suddenness
+of the change.  We passed in one night from hot summer to winter,
+which is like FINE English April, or October, only brighter than
+anything in Europe.  There is properly, no autumn or spring here;
+only hot, dry, brown summer, with its cold wind at times, and fresh
+green winter, all fragrance and flowers, and much less wind.  Mr.
+M-, of whom I told you, has been in every corner of the far East--
+Java, Sumatra, everywhere--and is extremely amusing.  He has
+brought his wife here for her health, and is as glad to talk as I
+am.  The conversation of an educated, clever person, is quite a new
+and delightful sensation to me now.  He appears to have held high
+posts under the East India Company, is learned in Oriental
+languages, and was last resident at Singapore.  He says that no
+doubt Java is Paradise, it is so lovely, and such a climate; but he
+does not look as if it had agreed with him.  I feel quite heart-
+sick at seeing these letters go off before me, instead of leaving
+them behind, as I had hoped.
+
+Well, I must say good-bye--or rather, 'auf Wiedersehn'--and God
+knows how glad I shall be when that day comes!
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII
+
+
+
+Capetown, April 19th.
+
+Dearest mother,
+
+Here I am, waiting for a ship; the steamer was too horrid:  and I
+look so much to the good to be gained by the voyage that I did not
+like to throw away the chance of two months at sea at this
+favourable time of year, and under favourable circumstances; so I
+made up my mind to see you all a month later.  The sea just off the
+Cape is very, very cold; less so now than in spring, I dare say.
+The weather to-day is just like VERY warm April at home--showery,
+sunshiny, and fragrant; most lovely.  It is so odd to see an autumn
+without dead leaves:  only the oaks lose theirs, the old ones drop
+without turning brown, and the trees bud again at once.  The rest
+put on a darker green dress for winter, and now the flowers will
+begin.  I have got a picture for you of my 'cart and four', with
+sedate Choslullah and dear little Mohammed.  The former wants to go
+with me, 'anywhere', as he placidly said, 'to be the missis'
+servant'.  What a sensation his thatchlike hat and handsome orange-
+tawny face would make at Esher!  Such a stalwart henchman would be
+very creditable.  I shall grieve to think I shall never see my
+Malay friends again; they are the only people here who are really
+interesting.  I think they must be like the Turks in manner, as
+they have all the eastern gentlemanly 'Gelassenheit' (ease) and
+politeness, and no eastern 'Geschmeidigkeit' (obsequiousness), and
+no idea of Baksheesh; withal frugal, industrious, and money-making,
+to an astonishing degree.  The priest is a bit of a proselytiser,
+and amused me much with an account of how he had converted English
+girls from their evil courses and made them good Mussulwomen.  I
+never heard a naif and sincere account of conversions FROM
+Christianity before, and I must own it was much milder than the
+Exeter Hall style.
+
+I have heard a great many expressions of sorrow for the Queen from
+the Malays, and always with the 'hope the people will take much
+care of her, now she is alone'.  Of course Prince Albert was only
+the Queen's husband to them, and all their feeling is about her.
+It is very difficult to see anything of them, for they want nothing
+of you, and expect nothing but dislike and contempt.  It would take
+a long time to make many friends, as they are naturally
+distrustful.  I found that eating or drinking anything, if they
+offer it, made most way, as they know they are accused of poisoning
+all Christians indiscriminately.  Of course, therefore, they are
+shy of offering things.  I drank tea in the Mosque at the end of
+Ramadan, and was surrounded by delighted faces as I sipped.  The
+little boy who waits in this house here had followed us, and was
+horrified:  he is still waiting to see the poison work.
+
+No one can conceive what has become of all the ships that usually
+touch here about this time.  I was promised my choice of Green's
+and Smith's, and now only the heavy old Camperdown is expected with
+rice from Moulmein.  A lady now here, who has been Heaven only
+knows WHERE NOT, praises Alexandria above all other places, after
+Suez.  Her lungs are bad, and she swears by Suez, which she says is
+the dreariest and healthiest (for lungs) place in the world.  You
+can't think how soon one learns to 'annihilate space', if not time,
+in one's thoughts, by daily reading advertisements for every port
+in India, America, Australia, &c., &c., and conversing with people
+who have just come from the 'ends of the earth'.  Meanwhile, I fear
+I shall have to fly from next winter again, and certainly will go
+with J- to Egypt, which seems to me like next door.
+
+I have run on, and not thanked you for your letter and M. Mignet's
+beautiful eloge of Mr. Hallam, which pleased me greatly.  I wish
+Englishmen could learn to speak with the same good taste and
+mesure.
+
+Mr. Wodehouse, who has been very civil to me, kindly tried to get
+me a passage home in a French frigate lying here, but in vain.  I
+am now sorry I let the Jack tars here persuade me not to go in the
+little barque; but they talked so much of the heat and damp of such
+tiny cabins in an iron vessel, that I gave her up, though I liked
+the idea of a good tossing in such a tiny cockboat.  I will leave a
+letter for the May mail, unless I sail within a week of to-morrow,
+or go by the Jason, which would be home far sooner than the mail.
+I only hope you and A- won't be uneasy; the worst that can happen
+is delay, and the long voyage will be all gain to health, which
+would not be the case in a steamer.
+
+All I hear of R- makes me wild to see her again.  The little
+darkies are the only pleasing children here, and a fat black
+toddling thing is 'allerliebst'.  I know a boy of four, literally
+jet black, whom I long to steal as he follows his mother up to the
+mountain to wash.  Little Malays are lovely, but TOO well-behaved
+and quiet.  I tried to get a real 'tottie', or 'Hotentotje', but
+the people were too drunk to remember where they had left their
+child.  C'est assez dire, that I should have had no scruple in
+buying it for a bottle of 'smoke' (the spirit made from grape
+husks).  They are clever and affectionate when they have a chance,
+poor things,--and so strange to look at.
+
+By the bye, a Bonn man, Dr. Bleek, called here with 'Grusse' from
+our old friends, Professor Mendelssohn and his wife.  He is
+devoting himself to Hottentot and aboriginal literature!--and has
+actually mastered the Caffre click, which I vainly practised under
+Kleenboy's tuition.  He wanted to teach me to say 'Tkorkha', which
+means 'you lie', or 'you have missed' (in shooting or throwing a
+stone, &c.)--a curious combination of meanings.  He taught me to
+throw stones or a stick at him, which he always avoided, however
+close they fell, and cried 'Tkorkha!'  The Caffres ask for a
+present, 'Tkzeelah Tabak', 'a gift for tobacco'.
+
+The Farnese Hercules is a living TRUTH.  I saw him in the street
+two days ago, and he was a Caffre coolie.  The proportions of the
+head and throat were more wonderful in flesh, or muscle rather,
+than in marble.  I know a Caffre girl of thirteen, who is a noble
+model of strength and beauty; such an arm--larger than any white
+woman's--with such a dimple in her elbow, and a wrist and hand
+which no glove is small enough to fit--and a noble countenance too.
+She is 'apprenticed', a name for temporary slavery, and is highly
+spoken of as a servant, as the Caffres always are.  They are a
+majestic race, but with just the stupid conceit of a certain sort
+of Englishmen; the women and girls seem charming.
+
+Easter Sunday.--The weather continues beautifully clear and bright,
+like the finest European spring.  It seems so strange for the
+floral season to be the winter.  But as the wind blows the air is
+quite cold to-day; nevertheless, I feel much better the last two
+days.  The brewing of the rain made the air very oppressive and
+heavy for three weeks, but now it is as light as possible.
+
+I must say good-bye, as the mail closes to-morrow morning.  Easter
+in autumn is preposterous, only the autumn looks like spring.  The
+consumptive young girl whom I packed off to the Cape, and her
+sister, are about to be married--of course.  Annie has had a touch
+of Algoa Bay fever, a mild kind of ague, but no sign of chest
+disease, or even delicacy.  My 'hurrying her off', which some
+people thought so cruel, has saved her.  Whoever comes SOON ENOUGH
+recovers, but for people far gone it is too bracing.
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV
+
+
+
+Capetown, Saturday, May 3d.
+
+Dearest mother,
+
+After five weeks of waiting and worry, I have, at last, sent my
+goods on board the ship Camperdown, now discharging her cargo, and
+about to take a small party of passengers from the Cape.  I offered
+to take a cabin in a Swedish ship, bound for Falmouth; but the
+captain could not decide whether he would take a passenger; and
+while he hesitated the old Camperdown came in.  I have the best
+cabin after the stern cabins, which are occupied by the captain and
+his wife and the Attorney-General of Capetown, who is much liked.
+The other passengers are quiet people, and few of them, and the
+captain has a high character; so I may hope for a comfortable,
+though slow passage.  I will let you know the day I sail, and leave
+this letter to go by post.  I may be looked for three weeks or so
+after this letter.  I am crazy to get home now; after the period
+was over for which I had made up my mind, home-sickness began.
+
+Mrs. R- has offered me a darling tiny monkey, which loves me; but I
+fear A- would send me away again if I returned with her in my
+pocket.  Nassirah, old Abdool's pretty granddaughter, brought me a
+pair of Malay shoes or clogs as a parting gift, to-day.  Mr. M-,
+the resident at Singapore, tells me that his secretary's wife, a
+Malay lady, has made an excellent translation of the Arabian
+Nights, from Arabic into Malay.  Her husband is an Indian
+Mussulman, who, Mr. M- said, was one of the ablest men he ever
+knew.  Curious!
+
+I sat, yesterday, for an hour, in the stall of a poor German
+basket-maker who had been long in Caffre-land.  His wife, a
+Berlinerin, was very intelligent, and her account of her life here
+most entertaining, as showing the different Ansicht natural to
+Germans.  'I had never', she said, 'been out of the city of Berlin,
+and KNEW NOTHING.'  (Compare with London cockney, or genuine
+Parisian.)  Thence her fear, on landing at Algoa Bay and seeing
+swarms of naked black men, that she had come to a country where no
+clothes were to be had; and what should she do when hers were worn
+out?  They had a grant of land at Fort Peddie, and she dug while
+her husband made baskets of cane, and carried them hundreds of
+miles for sale; sleeping and eating in Caffre huts.  'Yes, they are
+good, honest people, and very well-bred (anstandig), though they go
+as naked as God made them.  The girls are pretty and very delicate
+(fein), and they think no harm of it, the dear innocents.'  If
+their cattle strayed, it was always brought back; and they received
+every sort of kindness.  'Yes, madam, it is shocking how people
+here treat the blacks.  They call quite an old man 'Boy', and speak
+so scornfully, and yet the blacks have very nice manners, I assure
+you.'  When I looked at the poor little wizened, pale, sickly
+Berliner, and fancied him a guest in a Caffre hut, it seemed an odd
+picture.  But he spoke as coolly of his long, lonely journeys as
+possible, and seemed to think black friends quite as good as white
+ones.  The use of the words anstandig and fein by a woman who spoke
+very good German were characteristic.  She could recognise an
+'Anstandigkeit' not of Berlin.  I need not say that the Germans are
+generally liked by the coloured people.  Choslullah was astonished
+and Pleased at my talking German; he evidently had a preference for
+Germans, and put up, wherever he could, at German inns and
+'publics'.
+
+I went on to bid Mrs. Wodehouse good-bye.  We talked of our dear
+old Cornish friends.  The Governor and Mrs. Wodehouse have been
+very kind to me.  I dined there twice; last time, with all the dear
+good Walkers.  I missed seeing the opening of the colonial
+parliament by a mistake about a ticket, which I am sorry for.
+
+If I could have dreamed of waiting here so long, I would have run
+up to Algoa Bay or East London by sea, and had a glimpse of
+Caffreland.  Capetown makes me very languid--there is something
+depressing in the air--but my cough is much better.  I can't walk
+here without feeling knocked-up; and cab-hire is so dear; and
+somehow, nothing is worth while, when one is waiting from day to
+day.  So I have spent more money than when I was most amused, in
+being bored.
+
+Mr. J- drove me to the Capetown races, at Green Point, on Friday.
+As races, they were nichts, but a queer-looking little Cape
+farmer's horse, ridden by a Hottentot, beat the English crack
+racer, ridden by a first-rate English jockey, in an unaccountable
+way, twice over.  The Malays are passionately fond of horse-racing,
+and the crowd was fully half Malay:  there were dozens of carts
+crowded with the bright-eyed women, in petticoats of every most
+brilliant colour, white muslin jackets, and gold daggers in their
+great coils of shining black hair.  All most 'anstandig', as they
+always are.  Their pleasure is driving about en famille; the men
+have no separate amusements.  Every spare corner in the cart is
+filled by the little soft round faces of the intelligent-looking
+quiet children, who seem amused and happy, and never make a noise
+or have the fidgets.  I cannot make out why they are so well
+behaved.  It favours A-'s theory of the expediency of utter
+spoiling, for one never hears any educational process going on.
+Tiny Mohammed never spoke but when he was spoken to, and was always
+happy and alert.  I observed that his uncle spoke to him like a
+grown man, and never ordered him about, or rebuked him in the
+least.  I like to go up the hill and meet the black women coming
+home in troops from the washing place, most of them with a fat
+black baby hanging to their backs asleep, and a few rather older
+trotting alongside, and if small, holding on by the mother's gown.
+She, poor soul, carries a bundle on her head, which few men could
+lift.  If I admire the babies, the poor women are enchanted;--du
+reste, if you look at blacks of any age or sex, they MUST grin and
+nod, as a good-natured dog must wag his tail; they can't help it.
+The blacks here (except a very few Caffres) are from the
+Mozambique--a short, thick-set, ugly race, with wool in huge
+masses; but here and there one sees a very pretty face among the
+women.  The men are beyond belief hideous.  There are all possible
+crosses--Dutch, Mozambique, Hottentot and English, 'alles
+durcheinander'; then here and there you see that a Chinese or a
+Bengalee a passe par la.  The Malays are also a mixed race, like
+the Turks--i.e. they marry women of all sorts and colours, provided
+they will embrace Islam.  A very nice old fellow who waits here
+occasionally is married to an Englishwoman, ci-devant lady's-maid
+to a Governor's wife.  I fancy, too, they brought some Chinese
+blood with them from Java.  I think the population of Capetown must
+be the most motley crew in the world.
+
+Thursday, May 8th.--I sail on Saturday, and go on board to-morrow,
+so as not to be hurried off in the early fog.  How glad I am to be
+'homeward bound' at last, I cannot say.  I am very well, and have
+every prospect of a pleasant voyage.  We are sure to be well found,
+as the Attorney-General is on board, and is a very great man,
+'inspiring terror and respect' here.
+
+S- says we certainly SHALL put in at St. Helena, so make up your
+minds not to see me till I don't know when.  She has been on board
+fitting up the cabin to-day.  I have SUCH a rug for J-! a mosaic of
+skins as fine as marqueterie, done by Damara women, and really
+beautiful; and a sheep-skin blanket for you, the essence of warmth
+and softness.  I shall sleep in mine, and dream of African hill-
+sides wrapt in a 'Veld combas'.  The poor little water-tortoises
+have been killed by drought, and I can't get any, but I have the
+two of my own catching for M-.
+
+Good-bye, dearest mother.
+
+You would have been moved by poor old Abdool Jemaalee's solemn
+benediction when I took leave to-day.  He accompanied it with a
+gross of oranges and lemons.
+
+
+
+LETTER XV
+
+
+
+Capetown, Thursday, May 8th.
+
+At last, after no end of 'casus' and 'discrimina rerum', I shall
+sail on Saturday the 10th, per ship Camperdown, for East India
+Docks.
+
+These weary six weeks have cost no end of money and temper.  I have
+been eating my heart out at the delay, but it was utterly
+impossible to go by any of the Indian ships.  They say there have
+never been so few ships sailing from the Cape as this year, yet
+crowds were expected on account of the Exhibition.  The Attorney-
+General goes by our ship, so we are sure of good usage; and I hear
+he is very agreeable.  I have the best cabin next to the stern
+cabin, in both senses of NEXT.  S- has come back from the ship,
+where she has spent the day with the carpenter; and I am to go on
+board to-morrow.  Will you ask R- to cause inquiries to be made
+among the Mollahs of Cairo for a Hadji, by name Abdool Rachman, the
+son of Abdool Jemaalee, of Capetown, and, if possible, to get the
+inclosed letter sent him?  The poor people are in sad anxiety for
+their son, of whom they have not heard for four months, and that
+from an old letter.  Henry will thus have a part of all the
+blessings which were solemnly invoked on me by poor old Abdool, who
+is getting very infirm, but toddled up and cracked his old fingers
+over my head, and invoked the protection of Allah with all form;
+besides that Betsy sent me twelve dozen oranges and lemons.  Abdool
+Rachman is about twenty-six, a Malay of Capetown, speaks Dutch and
+English, and is supposed to be studying theology at Cairo.  The
+letter is written by the prettiest Malay girl in Capetown.
+
+I won't enter upon my longings to be home again, and to see you
+all.  I must now see to my last commissions and things, and send
+this to go by next mail.
+
+God bless you all, and kiss my darlings, all three.
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI
+
+
+
+Friday, May 16th.
+
+On board the good ship Camperdown, 500 miles North-west of Table-
+Bay.
+
+I embarked this day week, and found a good airy cabin, and all very
+comfortable.  Next day I got the carpenter's services, by being on
+board before all the rest, and relashed and cleeted everything,
+which the 'Timmerman', of course, had left so as to get adrift the
+first breeze.  At two o'clock the Attorney-General, Mr. Porter,
+came on board, escorted by bands of music and all the volunteers of
+Capetown, quorum pars maxima fuit; i.e. Colonel.  It was quite what
+the Yankees call an 'ovation'.  The ship was all decked with flags,
+and altogether there was le diable a quatre.  The consequence was,
+that three signals went adrift in the scuffle; and when a Frenchman
+signalled us, we had to pass for brutaux Anglais, because we could
+not reply.  I found means to supply the deficiency by the lining of
+that very ancient anonymous cloak, which did the red, while a
+bandanna handkerchief of the Captain's furnished the yellow, to the
+sailmaker's immense amusement.  On him I bestowed the blue outside
+of the cloak for a pair of dungaree trowsers, and in signalling now
+it is, 'up go 2.41, and my lady's cloak, which is 7.'
+
+We have had lovely weather, and on Sunday such a glorious farewell
+sight of Table Mountain and my dear old Hottentot Hills, and of
+Kaap Goed Hoop itself.  There was little enough wind till
+yesterday, when a fair southerly breeze sprang up, and we are
+rolling along merrily; and the fat old Camperdown DOES roll like an
+honest old 'wholesome' tub as she is.  It is quite a bonne fortune
+for me to have been forced to wait for her, for we have had a
+wonderful spell of fine weather, and the ship is the ne plus ultra
+of comfort.  We are only twelve first-class upper-deck passengers.
+The captain is a delightful fellow, with a very charming young
+wife.  There is only one child (a great comfort), a capital cook,
+and universal civility and quietness.  It is like a private house
+compared to a railway hotel.  Six of the passengers are invalids,
+more or less.  Mr. Porter, over-worked, going home for health to
+Ireland; two men, both with delicate chests, and one poor young
+fellow from Capetown in a consumption, who, I fear, will not
+outlive the voyage.  The doctor is very civil, and very kind to the
+sick; but I stick to the cook, and am quite greedy over the good
+fare, after the atrocious food of the Cape.  Said cook is a
+Portuguese, a distinguished artist, and a great bird-fancier.  One
+can wander all over the ship here, instead of being a prisoner on
+the poop; and I even have paid my footing on the forecastle.  S-
+clambers up like a lively youngster.  You may fancy what the
+weather is, that I have only closed my cabin-window once during
+half of a very damp night; but no one else is so airy.  The little
+goat was as rejoiced to be afloat again as her mistress, and is a
+regular pet on board, with the run of the quarter-deck.  She still
+gives milk--a perfect Amalthaea.  The butcher, who has the care of
+her, cockers her up with dainties, and she begs biscuit of the
+cook.  I pay nothing for her fare.  M-'s tortoises are in my cabin,
+and seem very happy.  Poor Mr. Porter is very sick, and so are the
+two or three coloured passengers, who won't 'make an effort' at
+all.  Mrs. H- (the captain's wife), a young Cape lady, and I are
+the only 'female ladies' of the party.  The other day we saw a
+shoal of porpoises, amounting to many hundreds, if not some
+thousands, who came frisking round the ship.  When we first saw
+them they looked like a line of breakers; they made such a splash,
+and they jumped right out of the water three feet in height, and
+ten or twelve in distance, glittering green and bronze in the sun.
+Such a pretty, merry set of fellows!
+
+We shall touch at St. Helena, where I shall leave this letter to go
+by the mail steamer, that you may know a few weeks before I arrive
+how comfortably my voyage has begun.
+
+We see no Cape pigeons; they only visit outward ships--is not that
+strange?--but, en revanche, many more albatrosses than in coming;
+and we also enjoy the advantage of seeing all the homeward-bound
+ships, as they all PASS us--a humiliating fact.  The captain
+laughed heartily because I said, 'Oh, all right; I shall have the
+more sea for my money',--when the prospect of a slow voyage was
+discussed.  It is very provoking to be so much longer separated
+from you all than I had hoped, but I really believe that the bad
+air and discomfort of the other ships would have done me serious
+injury; while here I have every chance of benefiting to the utmost,
+and having mild weather the whole way, besides the utmost amount of
+comfort possible on board ship.  There are some cockroaches,
+indeed, but that is the only drawback.  The Camperdown is fourteen
+years old, and was the crack ship to India in her day.  Now she
+takes cargo and poop-passengers only, and, of course, only gets
+invalids and people who care more for comfort than speed.
+
+Monday Evening, May 26th.--Here we are, working away still to reach
+St. Helena.  We got the tail of a terrific gale and a tremendous
+sea all night in our teeth, which broke up the south-east trades
+for a week.  Now it is all smooth and fair, with a light breeze
+again right aft; the old trade again.  Yesterday a large shark paid
+us a visit, with his suite of three pretty little pilot-fish,
+striped like zebras, who swam just over his back.  He tried on a
+sailor's cap which fell overboard, tossed it away contemptuously,
+snuffed at the fat pork with which a hook was baited, and would
+none of it, and finally ate the fresh sheep-skin which the butcher
+had in tow to clean it, previous to putting it away as a
+perquisite.  It is a beautiful fish in shape and very graceful in
+motion.
+
+To-day a barque from Algoa Bay came close to us, and talked with
+the speaking trumpet.  She was a pretty, clipper-built, sharp-
+looking craft, but had made a slower run even than ourselves.  I
+dare say we shall have her company for a long time, as she is bound
+for St. Helena and London.  My poor goat died suddenly the other
+day, to the general grief of the ship; also one of the tortoises.
+The poor consumptive lad is wonderfully better.  But all the
+passengers were very sick during the rough weather, except S- and
+I, who are quite old salts.  Last week we saw a young whale, a
+baby, about thirty feet long, and had a good view of him as he
+played round the ship.  We shall probably be at St. Helena on
+Wednesday, but I cannot write from thence, as, if there is time, I
+shall get a run on shore while the ship takes in water.  But this
+letter will tell you of my well-being so far, and in about six
+weeks after the date of it I hope to be with you.  I hope you won't
+expect too much in the way of improvement in my health.  I look
+forward, oh, so eagerly, to be with you again, and with my brats,
+big and little.  God bless you all.
+
+Yours ever,
+
+L. D. G.
+
+Wednesday, 28th.--Early morning, off St. Helena, James Town.
+
+Such a lovely UNREAL view of the bold rocks and baby-house forts on
+them!  Ship close in.  Washer-woman come on board, and all hurry.
+
+Au revoir.
+
+
+
+
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