wald and Boly, went off to the Lydenburg gold-diggings, trusting to be rewarded with better fortune than they had found in the diamond-fields.
I travelled thirty-four miles the next day, meeting on my route a large number of waggons containing emigrants, merchants, and canteen-keepers, all on their way to Lydenburg, their thirst for gold being now as ardent as once it had been for diamonds. I halted at Klerksdorp only till evening, when I hurried on to the Estherspruit. On the 1st of April I forded the Bamboespruit, and after crossing the Vaal, seventeen miles below Christiana, at Blignaut’s Pont, I arrived in Dutoitspan on the 7th.
Of all my curiosities, of which I brought back forty cases closely packed, I considered my ethnographical specimens, 400 in number, the most valuable; but in addition to these I had a great collection of insects, horns, plants, reptiles, skins of quadrupeds and birds, minerals, skeletons, spiders, crustaceans, mollusks, and fossils.
Although I had succeeded somewhat better than during my former journey in making a cartographical survey of the route, many obstacles with which the reader has been made acquainted in the previous pages, prevented me from making a map as complete as I desired.
My pecuniary position was now very much what it had been on my first appearance in Dutoitspan; to say the truth, it was rather worse, for immediately
