stands. It was not so with the curricle. When a horse fell, he would generally bring down his comrade horse with him, and then the vehicle would go,-to the almost certain destruction of the pole and the imminent danger of the passengers. But with the Cape cart the bar, instead of passing over the horse's back-the bar on which the vehicle must rest when for a moment it loses its balance on the two wheels with a propulsion forwards-passes under the horses' necks, with straps appended to the collars. I have never seen a horse fall with one of them;-but I can understand that when such an accident happens the falling horse should not bring the other animal down with him. The advantage of having two high wheels, and only two,-need not be explained to any traveller.

On the way to Fort Beaufort I passed by Fort Brown,a desolate barrack which was heretofore employed for the protection of the frontier when Grahamstown was the frontier city. I arrived there by a fine pass, excellently well engineered, through the mountains, called the Queen's Road,-very picturesque from the shape of the hills, though desolate from the absence of trees. But at Fort Brown the beauty was gone and nothing but the desolation remained. The Fort stands just off the road, on a plain, and would hold perhaps 40 or 50 men. I walked up to it and found one lonely woman who told me that she was the wife of a policeman stationed at some distant place. It had become the fate of her life to live here in solitude, and a more lonely creature I never saw. She was clean and pleasant and talked well;-but she declared that unless she was soon

She was

liberated from Fort Brown she must go mad. eloquent in favour of hard work, declaring that there was nothing else which could give a real charm to life;—but perhaps she had been roused to that feeling by knowing that there was not a job to be done upon the earth to which in her present circumstances she could turn her hand. Optat arare caballus. She told me of a son who was employed in one of the distant provinces, and bade me find him if I could and tell him of his mother. "Tell him to think of me here all alone," she said. I tried to execute my commission but failed to find the man.

I had intended sleeping at Fort Beaufort and on going from thence up the Catsberg Mountain. But I was prevented by the coming of a gentleman, a Wesleyan minister, who was very anxious that I should see the Kafir school at Healdtown over which he presided. From first to last through my tour I was subject to the privileges and inconveniences of being known as a man who was going to write a book. I never said as much to any one in South Africa,or even admitted it when interrogated. I could not deny that I possibly might do so, but I always protested that my examiner had no right to assume the fact. All this, however, was quite vain as coming from one who had written so much about other Colonies, and was known to be so inveterate a scribbler as myself. Then the argument, though never expressed in plain words, would take, in suggested ideas, the following form. "Here you are in South Africa, and you are going to write about us. If so I,-or we, or my or our Institution, have an absolute

claim to a certain

portion of your attention. You have no right to pass our town by, and then to talk of the next town merely because such an arrangement will suit your individual comfort! Then I would allege the shortness of my time. "Time indeed! Then take more time. Here am I,-or here are we, doing our very best; and we don't intend to be passed by because you don't allow yourself enough of time for your work." When all this was said on behalf of some very big store, or perhaps in favour of a pretty view, or-as has been the case, in pride at the possession of a little cabbage garden, I have been apt to wax wroth and to swear that I was my own master ;-but a Kafir missionary school, to which some earnest Christian man, with probably an earnest Christian wife, devotes a life in the hope of making fresh water flow through the dry wilderness, has claims, however painful they may be at the moment. This gentleman had come into Fort Beaufort on purpose to catch me. And as he was very eloquent, and as I did feel a certain duty, I allowed myself to be led away by him. I fear that I went ungraciously, and I know that I went unwillingly. It was just four o'clock and, having had no luncheon, I wanted my dinner. I had already established myself in a very neat little sitting-room in the Inn, and had taken off my boots. I was tired and dusty, and was about to wash myself. I had been on the road all day, and the bed-room offered to me looked sweet and clean;-and there was a pretty young lady at the Inn who had given me a cup of tea to support me till dinner should be ready. I was anxious also about the Catsberg Mountain, which under the

minister's guidance I should lose, at any rate for the present. I spoke to the minister of my dinner;-but he assured me that an hour would take me out to his place at Healdtown. He clearly thought, and clearly said,—that it was my duty to go, and I acceded. He promised to convey me to the establishment in an hour,-but it was two hours and a half before we were there. He allured me by speaking of the beauty of the road,—but it was pitch dark all the way. It was eight o'clock before my wants were supplied, and by that time I hated Kafir children thoroughly.

Of Healdtown and Lovedale, a much larger Kafir school, I will speak in the next chapter, which shall be exclusively educational. Near to Lovedale is the little town of Alice in which I stayed two days with the hospitable doctor. He took me out for a day's hunting as it is called, which in that benighted country means shooting. I must own here to have made a little blunder. When I was asked some days previously whether I would like to have a day's hunting got up for me in the neighbourhood of Alice, I answered with alacrity in the affirmative. Hunting, which is the easiest of all sports, has ever been an allurement to me. To hunt, as we hunt at home, it is only necessary that a man should stick on to the back of a horse,-or, failing that, that he should fall off. When hunting was offered to me I thought that I could at any rate go out and see. But on my arrival at Alice I found that hunting meant-shooting, an exercise of skill in which I had never even tried to prevail. "I haven't fired off a gun," I said, "for forty

years." But I had agreed to go out hunting, and word had passed about the country, and a hundred naked Kafirs were to be congregated to drive the game. I tried hard to escape. Might I not be allowed to go and see the naked Kafirs, without a gun,-especially as it was so probable that I might shoot one of them if I were armed?' But this would not do. I was told that the Kafirs would despise me. So I took the gun and carried it ever so many miles, on horseback, to my very great annoyance.

دو

At a certain spot on a hill side,-where the hill downwards was covered with bush and shrubs, we met the naked Kafirs. There were a hundred of them, I was told, more or less, and they were as naked as my heart could desire,—but each carrying some fragment of a blanket wound round on his arm, and many of them were decorated with bracelets and earrings. There were some preliminary ceremonies, such as the lying down of a young Kafir and the pretence of all the men around him, and of all the dogs, of which there was a large muster, that the prostrate figure was a dead buck over whom it was necessary to lick their lips and shake their weapons; and after this the Kafirs went down into the bush. Then I was led away by my white friend, carrying my gun and leading my horse, and after a while was told that the very spot had been found. If I would remain there with my gun cocked and ready, a buck would surely come by almost at once so that I might shoot him. I did as I was bid, and sat alert for thirty minutes holding my gun as though something to be shot would surely come every second. But nothing came and I gradually went to sleep..