of surrounding myself with horse provender. I was therefore glad to be able to throw all the responsibility of the road on to the shoulders of the proprietor of the coach, especially when I found that I was not to be called on to travel by night. A mail cart runs through from the Diamond Fields to Capetown, three times a week;—but it goes day and night and has no provision for meals. The journey so made is frightful, and is fit only for a very young man who is altogether regardless of his life. There is also a decent waggon;—but it runs only occasionally. Families, to whom time is not a great object, make the journey with ox-waggons, travelling perhaps 24 miles a day, sleeping in their waggons and carrying with them all that they want. Ladies who have tried it have told me that they did not look back upon the time so spent as the happiest moments of their existence. The coach was tiresome enough, taking seven days from the Diamond Fields to Port Elizabeth. Between Bloemfontein and Grahamstown, a trip of five days, it travels about fourteen hours a day. But at night there was always ten hours for supper and rest, and the accommodation on the whole was good. The beds were clean and the people along the road always civil. I was greatly taken with one little dinner which was given to us in the middle of the day at a small pretty Inn under the Catberg Mountain. The landlord, an old man, was peculiarly courteous, opening our soda water for us and handing us the brandy bottle with a grace that was all his own. Then he joined us on the coach and travelled along the road with us, and it turned out that he had been a member of the old Capetown Parliament, and
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