up, in summer green and fragrant and well watered.  The gardens are in good order, and I rather regretted not being able to examine them more thoroughly.  Another afternoon we drove to the Berea, a sort of suburban Richmond, where the rich semi-tropical vegetation is cleared away in patches, and villas with pretty pleasure-grounds are springing up in every direction.  The road winds up the luxuriantly-clothed slopes, with every here and there lovely sea-views of the harbor, with the purpling lights of the Indian Ocean stretching away beyond.  Every villa must have an enchanting prospect from its front door, and one can quite understand how alluring to the merchants and business—­men of D’Urban must be the idea of getting away after office-hours, and sleeping on such; high ground in so fresh and healthy an:  atmosphere.  And here I must say that we Maritzburgians (I am only one in prospective) wage a constant and deadly warfare with the D’Urbanites on the score of the health and convenience of our respective cities. We are two thousand feet above the sea and fifty-two miles inland, so we talk in a pitying tone of the poor D’Urbanites as dwellers in a very hot and unhealthy place.  “Relaxing” is the word we apply to their climate when we want to be particularly nasty, and they retaliate by reminding us that they are ever so much older than we are (which is an advantage in a colony), and that they are on the coast, and can grow all manner of nice things which we cannot compass, to say nothing of their climate being more equable than ours, and their thunderstorms, though longer in duration, mere flashes in the pan compared to what we in our amphitheatre of hills have to undergo at the hands of the electric current.  We never can find answer to that taunt, and if the D’Urbanites only follow up their victory by allusions to their abounding bananas and other fruits, their vicinity to the shipping, and consequent facility of getting almost anything quite easily, we are completely silenced, and it is a wonder if we retain presence of mind enough to murmur “Flies.”  On the score of dust we are about equal, but I must in fairness confess that D’Urban is a more lively and a better-looking town than Maritzburg when you are in it, though the effect from a distance is not so good.  It is very odd how unevenly the necessaries of existence are distributed in this country.  Here at D’Urban anything hard in the way of stone is a treasure:  everything is soft and friable:  sand and finest shingle, so fine as to be mere dust, are all the available material for road-making.  I am told that later on I shall find that a cartload of sand in Maritzburg is indeed a rare and costly thing:  there we are all rock, a sort of flaky, slaty rock underlying every place.  Our last day, or rather half day, in D’Urban was very full of sightseeing and work.  F——­ was extremely anxious for me to see the sun rise from the signal-station on the bluff, and accordingly he, G——­ and I started with the earliest dawn.  We drove