too great for his spring, and stood on his rock gazing at his prey. Nor could the buck go further. The stone it occupied. just beneath ourselves was altogether isolated, and it stood there looking up at us with its soft imploring eyes, while the Hottentot in his excitement cheered on the dog to make the leap which the poor hound knew to be too much for him. I cannot say which interested me most, the man beside me, the little buck just below my feet, or the anxious eager palpitating hound with his short sharp barks. There was no gun with us, but the Hottentot got fragments of stone to throw at the quarry. Then the buck knew that he must shift his ground if he meant to save himself, and, marking his moment, he jumped back at the dog, and was then up among the almost perpendicular rocks over our heads before the brute could seize it. I have always been anxious for a kill when hunting, but I was thoroughly rejoiced when that animal saved himself. The Hottentot who was fond of venison did not at all share my feelings.

This occurred about 22 miles from Swellendam, and delayed us a little. My host, who had accompanied me, had asked a house full of friends to dine with him at seven, and it was five when the buck escaped. South African travelling is generally slow; but under the pressure of the dinner party our horses were made to do the distance in an hour and fifty minutes.

From Swellendam we went on to Caledon another exquisitely clean little Dutch town. The distance from Swellendam to Caledon is nearly eighty miles, through the whole of which the road runs under the Zondereinde

mountains through a picturesque country which produces some of the best wool of the Colony. Caledon is another village of oak trees and pleasant detached Dutch-looking houses, each standing in its own garden and never mounting to a story above the ground. In winter no doubt the feeling inspired by these village-towns would be different; but when they are seen as I saw them, with the full foliage and the acorns on the oaks, and the little gardens over-filled with their luxuriance of flowers, with the streets as clean and shaded as the pet road through a gentleman's park, the visitor is tempted to repine because Fate did not make him a wine-growing, orange-planting, ostrich-feeding Dutch farmer. From Caledon we returned through East Somerset, a smaller village and less attractive but still of the same nature, to Capetown, getting on to the railway about twenty miles from the town at the Eerste River Station. In making this last journey we had gone through or over two other Passes, called How Hoek and Sir Lowry's Pass. They are, both of them, interesting enough for a visit from Capetown, but not sufficiently so to be spoken of at much length after the other roads through the mountains which I had seen. The route down from Sir Lowry's Pass leads to the coast of False Bay, of which Simon's Bay is an inlet. Between False Bay to the South and Table Bay to the North is the flat isthmus which forms the peninsula, on which stands Capetown and the Table Mountains, the Southern point of which is the Cape of Good Hope.

In this journey among the Dutch towns which lie around the capital I missed Stellenbosch, which is, I am told, the

most Dutch of them all. As good Americans when dead go to Paris, so do good Dutchmen while still alive go to Stellenbosch, and more especially good Dutchwomen, for it is a place much affected by widows. The whole of this country is so completely Dutch that an Englishman finds himself to be altogether a foreigner. The coloured people of all shades talk Dutch as their native language. It is hard at first to get over the feeling that a man or woman must be very ignorant who in an English Colony cannot speak English, but the truth is that many of the people are much less ignorant than they are at home with us, as they speak in some fashion both English and Dutch. In the Eastern Province of the Colony, as in the other Colonies and divisions of South Africa, the native speaks some native language,the Kafir, Zulu, or Bechuana language as the case may be; but in the part of the Western Province of which I am speaking, that part which the Dutch have long inhabited, —there is no native language left among the coloured people. Dutch has become their language. The South African language from the mouths of Kafirs and Zulus does not strike a stranger as being odd;-but Dutch volubility from Hottentot lips does do so.

I must not finish this short record of my journeys in the Western Province of the Cape Colony without repeating the expression of my opinion as to the beauty of the scenery and the special charms of the small towns which I had visited.

CHAPTER X.

FORT ELIZABETH AND GRAHAMSTOWN.

FROM Capetown I went on by sea to Fort Elizabeth or Algoa Bay, thus travelling from the Western to the Eastern Province, leaving the former when I had as yet seen but little of its resources because it was needful that I should make my tour through Natal and the Transvaal before the rainy season had commenced.* The run is one which generally occupies from thirty to forty hours, and was effected by us under the excellent auspices of Captain Travers in something but little in excess of the shorter period. It rained during the whole of our little journey, so that one could not get out upon the deck without a ducking;--which was chiefly remarkable in that on shore every one was complaining of drought and that for many weeks after my first arrival in South Africa this useless rain at sea was the only rain that I saw. Persons well instructed in their geography will know that Algoa Bay and Fort Elizabeth signify the same seaport,-as one might say that a ship hailed from the Clyde or from Glasgow. The Union Steam Ship Company

* It should be understood that the places described in the last three chapters were not visited till after my return from Natal, the Transvaal, the Diamond Fields, and the Orange Free State.

sends a first-class steamer once a month from Southampton to Algoa Bay, without touching at Capetown.

Fort Elizabeth, as I walked away from the quay up to the club where I took up my residence, seemed to be as clean, as straight, and as regular as a first class American little town in the State of Maine. All the world. was out on a holyday. It was the birthday of the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Fort-Elizabethians observed it with a loyalty of which we know nothing in England. Flags were flying about the ships in the harbour and every shop was closed in the town. I went up all alone with my baggage to the club, and felt very desolate. But everybody I met was civil, and I found a bedroom ready for me such as would be an Elysium, in vain to be sought for in a first class London hotel. My comfort, I own, was a little impaired by knowing that I had turned a hospitable South African out of his own tenement. On that first day I was very solitary, as all the world was away doing honour somewhere to the Duke of Edinburgh.

In the evening I went out, still alone, for a walk and, without a guide, found my way to the public park and the public gardens. I cannot say that they are perfect in horticultural beauty and in surroundings, but they are spacious, with ample room for improvement, well arranged as far as they are arranged, and with a promise of being very superior to anything of the kind at Capetown. The air was as Through them

sweet, I think, as any that I ever breathed.

I went on, leaving the town between me and the sea, on to a grassy illimitable heath on which, I told myself, that with