way up to a villa on the slope of the sandy hill.  Once I am away from the majestic influence of that store the original feeling of Port Elizabeth being rather a dreary place comes back upon me; but we drive all about—­to the Park, which may be said to be in its swaddling-clothes as a park, and to the Botanic Gardens, where the culture of foreign and colonial flowers and shrubs is carried on under the chronic difficulties of too much sun and wind and too little water.  Everywhere there is building going on—­very modest building, it is true, with rough-and-ready masonry or timber, and roofs of zinc painted in strips of light colors, but everywhere there are signs of progress and growth.  People look bored, but healthy, and it does not surprise me in the least to hear that though there are a good many inhabitants, there is not much society.  A pretty little luncheon and a pleasant hour’s chat in a cool, shady drawing-room, with plenty of new books and music and flowers, gave me an agreeable impression to carry back on board the ship; which, by the way, seemed strangely silent and deserted when we returned, for most of our fellow-passengers had disembarked here on their way to different parts of the interior.

As I saunter up and down the clean, smart-looking deck of what has been our pleasant floating home during these past four weeks, I suddenly perceive a short, squat pyramid on the shore, standing out oddly enough among the low-roofed houses.  If it had only been red instead of gray, it might have passed for the model of the label on Bass’s beer—­bottles; but, even as it is, I feel convinced that there is a story connected with it:  and so it proves, for this ugly, most unsentimental-looking bit of masonry was built long ago by a former governor as a record of the virtues and perfections of his dead wife, whom, among other lavish epithets of praise, he declares to have been “the most perfect of women.”  Anyhow, there it stands, on what was once a lonely strip of sand and sea, a memorial—­if one can only believe the stone story, now nearly a hundred years old—­of a great love and a great sorrow; and one can envy the one and pity the other just as much when looking at this queer, unsightly monument as when one stands on the pure marble threshold of the exquisite Taj Mahal at Agra, and reads that it too, in all its grace and beauty, was reared “in memory of an undying love.”

Although the day has been warm and balmy, the evening air strikes chill and raw, and our last evening on board the dear old ship has to be spent under shelter, for it is too cold to sit on deck.  With the first hours of daylight next morning we have to be up and packing, for by ten o’clock we must be on board the Florence, a small, yacht-like coasting-steamer which can go much closer into the sand-blocked harbors scooped by the action of the rivers all along the coast.  It is with a very heavy heart that I, for one, say good-bye to the Edinburgh Castle, where I have passed