No one was in any mood, however, to discuss political economy that beautiful day, and we laughed and chatted, and ate a great many luncheons, chiefly of tea and peaches, all the way along.  Our driver enlivened the route by pointing out various spots where frightful accidents had occurred to the post-cart on former occasions:  “You see that big stone?  Well, it war jest there that Langabilile and Colenso, they takes the bits in their teeth, those ’osses do, and they sets off their own pace and their own way.  Jim Stanway, he puts his brake down hard and his foot upon the reins, but, Lord love you! them beasts would ha’ pulled his arms and legs both off afore they’d give in.  So they runs poor Jim’s near wheel right up agin that bank and upsets the whole concern, as neat as needs be, over agin that bit o’ bog.  Anybody hurt?  Well, yes:  they was all what you might call shook.  Mr. Bell, he had his arm broke, and a foreign chap from the diamond-fields, he gets killed outright, and Jim himself had his head cut open.  It was a bad business, you bet, and rough upon Jim.  Ja!”

All the driver’s conversation is interlarded with “Ja,” but he never says a worse word than that, and he drinks nothing but tea.  As for a pipe, or a cigar even, when it is offered to him he screws up his queer face into a droll grimace and says, “No—­thanks.  I want all my nerves, I do, on this bit of road.—­Walk along, Lady Barker:  I’m ashamed of you, I am, hanging your head like that at a bit of a hill!” It was rather startling to hear this apostrophe all of a sudden, but as my namesake was a very hard-working little brown mare, I could only laugh and declare myself much flattered.

Here we are at last, amid the tropical vegetation which makes a green and tangled girdle around D’Urban for a dozen miles inland:  yonder is the white and foaming line of breakers which marks where the strong current, sweeping down the east coast, brings along with it all the sand and silt it can collect, especially from the mouth of the Umgeni River close by, and so forms the dreaded bar, which divides the outer from the inner harbor.  Beyond this crisp and sparkling line of heaving, tossing snow stretches the deep indigo-blue of the Indian Ocean, whilst over all wonderful sunset tints of opal and flame-color are hovering and changing with the changing, wind-driven clouds.  Beneath our wheels are many inches of thick white sand, but the streets are gay and busy, with picturesque coolies in their bright cotton draperies and swiftly-passing Cape carts and vehicles of all sorts.  We are in D’Urban indeed—­D’Urban in unwonted holiday dress and on the tippest tiptoe of expectation and excitement.  A Cape cart, with a Chinese coolie driver, and four horses apparently put in harness together for the first time, was waiting for us and our luggage at the post-office.  We got into it, and straight-way began to plunge through the sandy streets once more, turning off the high-road