light. Then comes a cloud over Table Mountain, like the sugar on a
wedding-cake, which tumbles down in splendid waterfalls, and
vanishes unaccountably halfway; and then you run indoors and shut
doors and windows, or it portends a 'south-easter', i.e. a
hurricane, and Capetown disappears in impenetrable clouds of dust.
But this wind coming off the hills and fields of ice, is the Cape
doctor, and keeps away cholera, fever of every sort, and all
malignant or infectious diseases. Most of them are unknown here.
Never was so healthy a place; but the remedy is of the heroic
nature, and very disagreeable. The stones rattle against the
windows, and omnibuses are blown over on the Rondebosch road.

A few days ago, I drove to Mr. V-'s farm. Imagine St. George's
Hill, and the most beautiful bits of it, sloping gently up to Table
Mountain, with its grey precipices, and intersected with Scotch
burns, which water it all the year round, as they come from the
living rock; and sprinkled with oranges, pomegranates, and camelias
in abundance. You drive through a mile or two as described, and
arrive at a square, planted with rows of fine oaks close together;
at the upper end stands the house, all on the ground-floor, but on
a high stoep: rooms eighteen feet high; the old slave quarters on
each side; stables, &c., opposite; the square as big as Belgrave
Square, and the buildings in the old French style.

We then went on to Newlands, a still more beautiful place. Immense
trenching and draining going on--the foreman a Caffre, black as
ink, six feet three inches high, and broad in proportion, with a
staid, dignified air, and Englishmen working under him! At the
streamlets there are the inevitable groups of Malay women washing
clothes, and brown babies sprawling about. Yesterday, I should