one for some ten minutes or so.  A few drops of cold rain fall to the sound of the distant thunder, now rolling away eastward, which yet “struggles and howls at fits.”  It is not always distant, but we have not yet seen a real thunderstorm; only a few of these short, sudden electrical disturbances, which come and go more like explosions than anything else.  A few days ago there was a duststorm which had a very curious effect as we looked down upon it from this hill.  All along the roads one could watch the dust being caught up, as it were, and whirled along in dense clouds, whilst the poor little town itself was absolutely blotted out by the blinding masses of fine powder.  For half an hour or so we could afford to watch and smile at our neighbors’ plight, but soon we had to flee for shelter ourselves within the house, for a furious hot gale drove heavily up behind the dust and nearly blew us away altogether.  Still, there was no thunderstorm, though we quite wished for one to cool the air and refresh the parched and burnt-up grass and flowers.  Such afternoons are generally pretty sure to be succeeded by a cold night, and perhaps a cold, damp morning; and one can already understand that these alternations during the summer months are apt to produce dysentery among young children.  I hear just now of a good many such cases among babies.

I have been so exceedingly busy this month packing, arranging and settling that there has been but little time for going about and seeing the rather pretty environs of Maritzburg; besides which, the weather is dead against excursions, changing as it does to rain or threatening thunderstorms nearly every afternoon.  One evening we ventured out for a walk in spite of growlings and spittings up above among the crass-looking clouds.  Natal is not a nice country, for women at all events, to walk in.  You have to keep religiously to the road or track, for woe betide the rash person who ventures on the grass, though from repeated burnings all about these hills it is quite short.  There is a risk of your treading on a snake, and a certainty of your treading on a frog.  You will soon find your legs covered with small and pertinacious ticks, who have apparently taken a “header” into your flesh and made up their minds to die sooner than let go.  They must be the bull-dogs of the insect tribe, these ticks, for a sharp needle will scarcely dislodge them.  At the last extremity of extraction they only burrow their heads deeper into the skin, and will lose this important part of their tiny bodies sooner than yield to the gentlest leverage.  Then there are myriads of burs which cling to you in green and brown scales of roughness, and fringe your petticoats with their sticky little lumps.  As for the poor petticoats themselves, however short you may kilt them, you bring them back from a walk deeply flounced with the red clay of the roads; and as the people who wash do not seem to consider this a disadvantage, and take but little pains to remove the earth-stains,