dirt all over it.  That was after a drive into Maritzburg along a road ploughed up by ox-wagons.  Still, I felt no uneasiness.  What is a cotton gown made for if not to be washed?  Away it goes to the wash!  What is this limp, discolored rag which returns to me iron-moulded, blued until it is nearly black, rough-dried, starched in patches, with the fringe of red earth only more firmly fixed than before?  Behold my favorite ivory cotton!  My white gowns are even in a worse plight, for there are no two yards of them the same, and the grotesque mixture of extreme yellowness, extreme blueness and a pervading tinge of the red mud they have been washed in renders them a piteous example of misplaced confidence.  Other things fare rather better—­not much—­but my poor gowns are only hopeless wrecks, and I am reduced to some old yachting dresses of ticking and serge.  The price of washing, as this spoiling process is pleasantly called, is enormous, and I exhaust my faculties in devising more economical arrangements.  We can’t wash at home, for the simple reason that we have no water, no proper appliances of any sort, and to build and buy such would cost a small fortune.  But a tall, white-aproned Kafir, with a badge upon his arm, comes now at daylight every Monday morning and takes away a huge sackful of linen, which is placed, with sundry pieces of soap and blue in its mouth, all ready for him.  He brings it back in the afternoon full of clean and dry linen, for which he receives three shillings and sixpence.  But this is only the first stage.  The things to be starched have to be sorted and sent to one woman, and those to be mangled to another, and both lots have to be fetched home again by Tom and Jack. (I have forgotten to tell you that Jack’s real name, elicited with great difficulty, as there is a click somewhere in it, is “Umpashongwana,” whilst the pickle Tom is known among his own people as “Umkabangwana.”  You will admit that our substitutes for these five-syllabled appellations are easier to pronounce in a hurry.  Jack is a favorite name:  I know half a dozen black Jacks myself.) To return, however, to the washing.  I spend my time in this uncertain weather watching the clouds on the days when the clothes are to come home, for it would be altogether too great a trial if one’s starched garments, borne aloft on Jack’s head, were to be caught in a thunder-shower.  If the washerwoman takes pains with anything, it is with gentlemen’s shirts, though even then she insists on ironing the collars into strange and fearful shapes.

Let not men think, however, that they have it all their own way in the matter of clothes.  White jackets and trousers are commonly worn here in summer, and it is very soothing, I am told, to try to put them on in a hurry when the arms and legs are firmly glued together by several pounds of starch.  Then as to boots and shoes:  they get so mildewed if laid aside for even a few days as to be absolutely offensive; and these, with hats, wear out at the most astonishing rate.  The sun and dust and rain finish up the hats in less than no time.