light Cape carts came to the door, and we set off to see a beautiful garden whose owner had all a true Dutchman’s passion for flowers.  Here was fruit as well as flowers.  Pine-apples and jasmine, strawberries and honeysuckle, grew side by side with bordering orange trees, feathery bamboos and sheltering gum trees.  In the midst of the garden stood a sort of double platform, up whose steep border we all climbed:  from this we got a good idea of the slightly undulating land all about, waving down like solidified billows to where the deep blue waters sparkled and rolled restlessly beyond the white line of waves ever breaking on the bar.  I miss animal life sadly in these parts:  the dogs I see about the streets are few in number, and miserably currish specimens of their kind.  “Good dogs don’t answer out here,” I am told:  that is to say, they get a peculiar sort of distemper, or ticks bite them, or they got weak from loss of blood, or become degenerate in some way.  The horses and cattle are small and poor-looking, and hard-worked, very dear to buy and very difficult to keep and to feed.  I don’t even see many cats, and a pet bird is a rarity.  However, as we stood on the breezy platform I saw a most beautiful wild bird fly over the rose-hedge just below us.  It was about as big as a crow, but with a strange iridescent plumage.  When it flitted into the sunshine its back and wings shone like a rainbow, and the next moment it looked perfectly black and velvety in the shade.  Now a turquoise-blue tint comes out on its spreading wings, and a slant in the sunshine turns the blue into a chrysoprase green.  Nobody could tell me its name:  our Dutch host spoke exactly like Hans Breitmann, and declared it was a “bid of a crow,” and so we had to leave it and the platform and come down to more roses and tea.  There was so much yet to be seen and to be done that we could not stay long, and, laden with magnificent bouquets of gloire de Dijon roses and honeysuckle, and divers strange and lovely flowers, we drove off again in our Cape carts.  I observed that instead of saying “Whoa!” or checking the horses in anyway by the reins, the driver always whistles to them—­long, low whistle—­and they stand quite still directly.  We bumped up and down, over extraordinarily rough places, and finally slid down a steep cutting to the brink of the river Buffalo, over which we were ferried, all standing, on a big punt, or rather pontoon.  A hundred yards or so of rapid driving then took us to a sort of wharf which projected into the river, where the important-looking little tug awaited us; and no sooner were we all safely on board—­rather a large party by this time, for we had gone on picking up stragglers ever since we started, only three in number, from the hotel—­than she sputtered and fizzed herself off up-stream.  By this time it was the afternoon, and I almost despair of making you see the woodland beauty of that broad mere, fringed down to the water’s edge on one