one’s garments gradually acquire, even when clean, a uniform bordering of dingy red.  All the water at this time of year is red too, as the rivers are stirred up by the heavy summer rains, and resemble angry muddy ditches more than fresh-water streams.  I miss at every turn the abundance of clear, clean, sparkling water in the creeks and rivers of my dear New Zealand, and it is only after heavy rain, when every bath and large vessel has been turned into a receptacle during the downpour, that one can compass the luxury of an inviting-looking bath or glass of drinking-water.  Of course this turbid water renders it pretty difficult to get one’s clothes properly washed, and the substitute for a mangle is an active Kafir, who makes the roughly-dried clothes up into a neat parcel, places them on a stone and dances up and down upon them for as long or short a time as he pleases.  Fuel is so enormously dear that the cost of having clothes ironed is something astounding, and altogether washing is one of the many costly items of Natalian housekeeping.  When I remember the frantic state of indignation and alarm we were all in in England three years ago when coals rose to L2 10s. a ton, and think how cheap I should consider that price for fuel here, I can’t help a melancholy smile.  Nine solid sovereigns purchase you a tolerable-sized load of wood, about equal for cooking purposes to a ton of coal; but whereas the coal is at all events some comfort and convenience to use, the wood is only a source of additional trouble and expense.  It has to be cut up and dried, and finally coaxed and cajoled by incessant use of the bellows into burning.  Besides the price of fuel, provisions of all sorts seem to me to be dear and bad.  Milk is sold by the quart bottle:  it is now fourpence per bottle, but rises to sixpence during the winter.  Meat is eightpence a pound, but it is so thin and bony, and of such indifferent quality, that there is very little saving in that respect.  I have not tasted any really good butter since we arrived, and we pay two shillings a pound for cheesy, rancid stuff.  I hear that “mealies,” the crushed maize, are also very dear, and so is forage for the horses.  Instead of the horses being left out on the run night and day, summer and winter, as they used to be in New Zealand, with an occasional feed of oats for a treat, they need to be carefully housed at night and well fed with oaten straw and mealies to give them a chance against the mysterious and fatal “horse-sickness,” which kills them in a few hours.  Altogether, so far as my very limited experience—­of only a few weeks, remember—­goes, I should say that Natal was an expensive place to live in, owing to the scarcity and dearness of the necessaries of life.  I am told that far up in the country food and fuel are cheap and good, and that it is the dearness and difficulty of transport which forces Maritzburg to depend for its supplies entirely on what is grown in its own immediate vicinity, where there is not very much land under cultivation; so we must look to the coming railway to remedy all that.