competition for their possession. But ostrich feathers may become a drug. When the nurse-maid affects them the Duchess will cease to do so.
Grahamstown is served by two ports. There is the port of Port Elizabeth in Algoa Bay which I have already described as a thriving town and one from which a railway is being made across the country, with a branch to Grahamstown. All the mail steamers from England to Capetown come on to Algoa Bay, and there is also a direct steamer from Plymouth once a month. The bulk of the commerce for the whole adjacent district comes no doubt to Port Elizabeth. But the people of Grahamstown affect Port Alfred, which is at the mouth of the Kowie river and only 35 miles distant from the Eastern Capital. I was therefore taken down to see Port Alfred.
I went down on one side of the river by a four-horsed cart as far as the confluence of the Mansfield, and thence was shewn the beauties of the Kowie river by boat. Our party dined and slept at Port Alfred, and on the following day we came back to Grahamstown by cart on the other side of the river. I was perhaps more taken with the country which I saw than with the harbour, and was no longer at a loss to know where was the land on which the English settlers of 1820 were intended to locate themselves. We passed through a ruined village called Bathurst,—a village ruined while it was yet young, than which nothing can be more painful to behold. Houses had been built again, but almost every house had at one time,—that is in the Kafir war of 1850,—been either burnt or left to desola-
