I am so glad little G——­ is not old enough to want to catch them all and impale them upon corks in a glass case; so the pretty creatures live out their brief and happy life in the sunshine, without let or hinderance from him.

The subject of which my mind is most full just now is the purchase of a horse.  F——­ has a fairly good chestnut cob of his own; G——­ has become possessed, to his intense delight, of an aged and long-suffering Basuto pony, whom he fidgets to death during the day by driving him all over the place, declaring he is “only showing him where the nicest grass grows;” and I want a steed to draw my pony-carriage and to carry me.  F——­ and I are at dagger’s drawn on this question.  He wants to buy me a young, handsome, showy horse of whom his admirers predict that “he will steady down presently,” whilst my affections are firmly fixed on an aged screw who would not turn his head if an Armstrong gun were fired behind him.  His owner says Scotsman is “rising eleven:”  F——­ declares Scotsman will never see his twentieth birthday again.  F——­ points out to me that Scotsman has had rough times of it, apparently, in his distant youth, and that he is strangely battered about the head, and has a large notch out of one ear.  I retaliate by reminding him how sagely the old horse picked his way, with a precision of judgment which only years can give, through the morass which lies at the foot of the hill, and which must be crossed every time I go into town (and there is nowhere else to go).  That morass is a bog in summer and a honey-comb of deep ruts and holes in winter, which, you must bear in mind, is the dry season here.  Besides his tact in the matter of the morass, did I not drive Scotsman the other day to the park, and did he not comport himself in the most delightfully sedate fashion?  You require experience to be on the lookout for the perils of Maritzburg streets, it seems, for all their sleepy, deserted, tumble-down air.  First of all, there are the transport-wagons, with their long span of oxen straggling all across the road, and a nervous bullock precipitating himself under your horse’s nose.  The driver, too, invariably takes the opportunity of a lady passing him to crack his whip violently, enough to startle any horse except Scotsman.  Then when you have passed the place where the wagons most do congregate, and think you are tolerably safe and need only look out for ruts and holes in the street, lo! a furious galloping behind you, and some half dozen of the “gilded youth” of Maritzburg dash past you, stop, wheel round and gallop past again, until you are almost blinded with dust or smothered with mud, according to the season.  This peril occurred several times during my drive to and from the park, and I can only remark that dear old Scotsman kept his temper better than I did:  perhaps he was more accustomed to Maritzburg manners.