it is a thousand times duller than the dullest country village), as they do in England.  Some small concession is made to the thermometer in the matter of puggeries and matted floors, but even then carpets are used wherever it is practicable, because this matting never looks clean and nice after the first week it is put down.  All the houses are built on the ground floor, with the utmost economy of building material and labor, and consequently there are no passages:  every room is, in fact, a passage and leads to its neighbor.  So the perpetually dirty bare feet, or, still worse, boots fresh from the mud or dust of the streets, soon wear out the matting.  Few houses are at all prettily decorated or furnished, partly from the difficulty of procuring anything pretty here, the cost and risk of its carriage up from D’Urban if you send to England for it, and partly from the want of servants accustomed to anything but the roughest and coarsest articles of household use.  A lady soon begins to take her drawing-room ornaments en guignon if she has to dust them herself every day in a very dusty climate.  I speak feelingly and with authority, for that is my case at this moment, and applies to every other part of the house as well.

I must say I like Kafir servants in some respects.  They require, I acknowledge, constant supervision; they require to be told to do the same thing over and over again every day; and, what is more, besides telling, you have to stand by and see that they do the thing.  They are also very slow.  But still, with all these disadvantages, they are far better than the generality of European servants out here, who make their luckless employers’ lives a burden to them by reason of their tempers and caprices.  It is much better, I am convinced, to face the evil boldly and to make up one’s mind to have none but Kafir servants.  Of course one immediately turns into a sort of overseer and upper servant one’s self; but at all events you feel master or mistress of your own house, and you have faithful and good-tempered domestics, who do their best, however awkwardly, to please you.  Where there are children, then indeed a good English nurse is a great boon; and in this one respect I am fortunate.  Kafirs are also much easier to manage when the orders come direct from the master or mistress, and they work far more willingly for them than for white servants.  Tom, the nurse-boy, confided to me yesterday that he hoped to stop in my employment for forty moons.  After that space of time he considered that he should be in a position to buy plenty of wives, who would work for him and support him for the rest of his life.  But how Tom or Jack, or any of the boys in fact, are to save money I know not, for every shilling of their wages, except a small margin for coarse snuff, goes to their parents, who fleece them without mercy.  If they are fined for breakages or misconduct (the only punishment a Kafir cares for), they have to account for the deficient