I Felt As If It Was Quite Selfish To Enjoy Anything So Much When You Were All So Anxious About Me At Home; But As That Is The Best Symptom Of All, I Do Not Repent.

S- has been an excellent travelling servant, and really a better companion than many more educated people; for she is always amused and curious, and is friendly with the coloured people.

She is quite recovered. It is a wonderful climate - sans que cela paraisse. It feels chilly and it blows horridly, and does not seem genial, but it gives new life.

To-morrow I am going with old Abdool Jemaalee to prayers at the Mosque, and shall see a school kept by a Malay priest. It is now Ramadan,. and my Muslim friends are very thin and look glum. Choslullah sent a message to ask, 'Might he see the Missis once more? He should pray all the time she was on the sea.' Some pious Christians here would expect such horrors to sink the ship. I can't think why Mussulmans are always gentlemen; the Malay coolies have a grave courtesy which contrasts most strikingly with both European vulgarity and negro jollity. It is very curious, for they only speak Dutch, and know nothing of oriental manners. I fear I shall not see the Walkers again. Simon's Bay is too far to go and come in a day, as one cannot go out before ten or eleven, and must be in by five or half-past. Those hours are gloriously bright and hot, but morning and night are cold.

I am so happy in the thought of sailing now so very soon and seeing you all again, that I can settle to nothing for five minutes. I now feel how anxious and uneasy I have been, and how I shall rejoice to get home. I shall leave a letter for A-, to go in April, and tell him and you what ship I am in. I shall choose the SLOWEST, so as not to reach England and face the Channel before June, if possible. So don't be alarmed if I do not arrive till late in June. Till then good-bye, and God bless you, dearest mother - Auf frohes Wiedersehn.

LETTER XII

Capetown, Sunday, March 23d.

It has been a REAL hot day, and threatened an earthquake and a thunderstorm; but nothing has come of it beyond sheet lightning to- night, which is splendid over the bay, and looks as if repeated in a grand bush-fire on the hills opposite. The sunset was glorious. That rarest of insects, the praying mantis, has just dropped upon my paper. I am thankful that, not being an entomologist, I am dispensed from the sacred duty of impaling the lovely green creature who sits there, looking quite wise and human. Fussy little brown beetles, as big as two lady-birds, keep flying into my eyes, and the musquitoes are rejoicing loudly in the prospect of a feast. You will understand by this that both windows are wide open into the great verandah, - very unusual in this land of cold nights.

April 4th. - I have been trying in vain to get a passage home. The Camperdown has not come. In short, I am waiting for a chance vessel, and shall pack up now and be ready to go on board at a day's notice.

I went on the last evening of Ramadan to the Mosque, having heard there was a grand 'function'; but there were only little boys lying about on the floor, some on their stomachs, some on their backs, higgledy-piggledy (if it be not profane to apply the phrase to young Islam), all shouting their prayers a tue tete. Priests, men, women, and English crowded in and out in the exterior division. The English behaved a l'Anglaise - pushed each other, laughed, sneered, and made a disgusting display of themselves. I asked a stately priest, in a red turban, to explain the affair to me, and in a few minutes found myself supplied by one Mollah with a chair, and by another with a cup of tea - was, in short, in the midst of a Malay soiree. They spoke English very little, but made up for it by their usual good breeding and intelligence. On Monday, I am going to see the school which the priest keeps at his house, and to 'honour his house by my presence'. The delight they show at any friendly interest taken in them is wonderful. Of course, I am supposed to be poisoned. A clergyman's widow here gravely asserts that her husband went mad THREE YEARS after drinking a cup of coffee handed to him by a Malay! - and in consequence of drinking it! It is exactly like the mediaeval feeling about the Jews. I saw that it was quite a DEMONSTRATION that I drank up the tea unhesitatingly. Considering that the Malays drank it themselves, my courage deserves less admiration. But it was a quaint sensation to sit in a Mosque, behaving as if at an evening party, in a little circle of poor Moslim priests.

I am going to have a photograph of my cart done. I was to have gone to the place to-day, but when Choslullah (whom I sent for to complete the picture) found out what I wanted, he implored me to put it off till Monday, that he might be better dressed, and was so unhappy at the notion of being immortalized in an old jacket, that I agreed to the delay. Such a handsome fellow may be allowed a little vanity.

The colony is torn with dissensions as to Sunday trains. Some of the Dutch clergy are even more absurd than our own on that point. A certain Van der Lingen, at Stellenbosch, calls Europe 'one vast Sodom', and so forth. There is altogether a nice kettle of religious hatred brewing here. The English Bishop of Capetown appoints all the English clergy, and is absolute monarch of all he surveys; and he and his clergy are carrying matters with a high hand.

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