in field and mealy-patch without wages.  Jack the Zulu wanted to be nurse-boy dreadfully, and used to follow Nurse about with a towel rolled up into a bundle, and another towel arranged as drapery, dandling an imaginary baby on his arm, saying plaintively, “Piccaninny, piccaninny!” This Nurse translated to mean that he was an experienced nurse-boy, and had taken care of a baby in his own country, but as I had no confidence in maladroit Jack, who chanced to be very deaf besides, he was ruthlessly relegated to his pots and pans.

It is very curious to see the cast-off clothes of all the armies of Europe finding their way hither.  The natives of South Africa prefer an old uniform coat or tunic to any other covering, and the effect of a short scarlet garment when worn with bare legs is irresistibly droll.  The apparently inexhaustible supply of old-fashioned English coatees with their worsted epaulettes is just coming to an end, and being succeeded by ragged red tunics, franc-tireurs’ brownish-green jackets and much-worn Prussian gray coats.  Kafir-Land may be looked upon as the old-clothes shop of all the fighting world, for sooner or later every cast-off scrap of soldier’s clothing drifts toward it.  Charlie prides himself much upon the possession of an old gray great-coat, so patched and faded that it may well have been one of those which toiled up the slopes of Inkerman that rainy Sunday morning twenty years ago; whilst scampish Tom got well chaffed the other day for suddenly making his appearance clad in a stained red tunic with buff collar and cuffs, and the number of the old “dirty Half-hundred” in tarnished metal on the shoulder-scales.  “Sir Garnet,” cried Charlie the witty, whilst Jack affected to prostrate himself before the grinning imp, exclaiming, “O great inkosi!”

Charlie is angry with me just now, and looks most reproachfully my way on all occasions.  The cause is that he was sweeping away sundry huge spiders’ webs from the roof of the verandah (the work of a single night) when I heard him coughing frightfully.  I gave him some lozenges, saying, “Do your cough good, Charlie.”  Charlie received them in both hands held like a cup, the highest form of Kafir gratitude, and gulped them all down on the spot.  Next day I heard the same dreadful cough, and told F——­ to give him some more lozenges.  But Charlie would have none of them, alleging he “eats plenty to-morrow’s yesterday, and dey no good at all;” and he evidently despises me and my remedies.

If only there were no hot winds!  But the constant changes are so trying and so sudden.  Sometimes we have a hot, scorching gale all day, drying and parching one’s very skin up, and shriveling one’s lovely roses like the blast from a furnace:  then in the afternoon a dark cloud sails suddenly up from behind the hills to the west.  It is over the house before one knows it is coming:  a loud clap of thunder shakes the very ground beneath one’s feet, others follow rapidly, and a thunderstorm bewilders