of their true value to the stranger’s eye.  The most beautiful part of the road, however, to my taste, is the descent, when the shining expanse of Camp’s Bay lies shimmering in the warm afternoon haze with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud and cliff touching and passing over the crisp water-surface.  By many a steep zigzag we round the Lion’s Head, and drop once more on a level road running parallel to the sea-shore, and so home in the balmy and yet bracing twilight.  The midday sun is hot and scorching even at this time of year, but it is always cool in the shade, and no sooner do the afternoon shadows grow to any length than the air freshens into sharpness, and by sundown one is glad of a good warm shawl.

    OCTOBER 18.

Another bright, ideal day, and the morning passed in a delicious flower-filled room looking over old books and records and listening to odd, quaint little scraps from the old Dutch records.  But directly after luncheon (and how hungry we all are, and how delicious everything tastes on shore!) the open break with four capital horses comes to the door, and we start for a long, lovely drive.  Half a mile or so takes us out on a flat red road with Table Mountain rising straight up before it, but on the left stretches away a most enchanting panorama.  It is all so soft in coloring and tone, distinct and yet not hard, and exquisitely beautiful!

The Blue-Berg range of mountains stretch beyond the great bay, which, unless a “sou’-easter” is tearing over it, lies glowing in tranquil richness.  This afternoon it is colored like an Italian lake.  Here are lines of chrysoprase, green-fringed, white with little waves, and beyond lie dark, translucent, purple depths, which change with every passing cloud.  Beyond these amethystic shoals again stretches the deep blue water, and again beyond, and bluer still, rise the five ranges of “Hottentots’ Holland,” which encircle and complete the landscape, bringing the eye round again to the nearer cliffs of the Devil’s Peak.  When the Dutch came here some two hundred years ago, they seized upon this part of the coast and called it Holland, driving the Hottentots beyond the neighboring range and telling them that was to be their Holland—­a name it keeps to this day.  Their consciences must have troubled them after this arbitrary division of the soil, for up the highest accessible spurs of their own mountain they took the trouble to build several queer little square houses called “block-houses,” from which they could keep a sharp look-out for foes coming over the hills from Hottentots’ Holland.  The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the gun-carriages—­for they managed to drag heavy ordnance up the steep hill-side—­have rotted away, whilst the old-fashioned cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled profusion of wild geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled up to one of the nearest