the far wilderness in search of the lord of the forest and all his subjects. They hunt far more than the English farmers, and are, as I have said, "crack" shots, though they use a great, long, awkward, heavy, flintlocked gun, that would make Purdey or Westley Richards shudder with disgust.

The characteristics of a race certainly descend to the fifth and sixth, perhaps the fiftieth generation. The Cape Dutchmen are the same frugal, industrious, sober people as those of the parent stock in Holland. Their persons are far more altered than their mental peculiarities, though the "Dutch build" is still apparent. They are, however, terrible "nonprogressionists." They use the same plough as their ancestors used eighty years ago, though it is the most lumbering machine ever beheld, and requires twelve strong oxen to draw it. They often shear their sheep with the wool all dirty on their backs, though their English fellowcolonists wash theirs most carefully, and thereby get far higher prices for their wool. They reject steam-mills, and adhere to some indescribable antediluvian contrivance for pounding, instead of grinding their corn. flail is unknown to them, and the corn is trodden out to this day by horses or oxen, as described, or alluded to, in the laws of Moses, whereby the straw is entirely spoilt. Their churns I have before alluded to. When first I saw one, with a dark damsel at work at it, I took it for a blacksmith's bellows, and wondered where the fire was.

A

Not the least pleasing characteristic of the Cape Dutch is their family affection. To the second and third generations they live at the same homestead, building an additional hut for each newly-wedded couple. They marry young, and have generally very large families; and, as many of them live to a great age, it is no uncommon thing to see a grandfather and grandmother of ninety surrounded by half a dozen sons, having in their turn each one half a dozen grown-up children. They appear to be truly "happy families."

The Dutch formerly entertained a great dislike to British rule. I do not mean to assert that they are even yet thoroughly reconciled to it; but they display less repugnance to submit to it than of yore. I fear they had too much of justice on their side in the complaints they uttered, for they had not met with proper treatment at the hands of our government. Their feeling must at all events have been very strong when it induced them to leave their own farms by the hundred, and "trek," or emigrate, to the north-east, anywhere away from British misrule.

The truth is, that the boers suffered severely from two acts of the English government, both praiseworthy in intention, but each direful in its results. The first of these was the emancipation of the slaves. I fancy I see all Exeter Hall frowning in virtuous indignation at the asseveration that this act was "direful in its results;" yet such I unhesitatingly affirm it to have been in the Cape Colony.

I am not going to defend (even were it possible to do so) the principle of slavery in the abstract; but I have to deal with simple facts. It is notorious that the Dutch were most kind and indulgent masters to their slaves. It is equally notorious that no class of people were better fed, clothed, or cared for; less overworked, or in any way ill used, than the slave population in South Africa. The government at home thought proper, from the noblest and purest motives, and at a great sacrifice, to set these people free. What was the result? These people (amounting to thirtysix thousand), who had hitherto had their every want supplied by their

masters, found the responsibility of providing for themselves thrust upon them without any previous training or preparation. Self-reliance they could not possibly have. But they were dazzled by the name of this new boon, "freedom." They thought it a fine thing to be at the beck and call of no man; they pictured to themselves the savage's seventh heaven of delight, the freedom to do nothing except get drunk. They actually abandoned their old masters in a body; those who had not one word of complaint to utter against their past treatment, equally with those who might consider themselves aggrieved. They abandoned their ancient homes, and commenced the celebration of those fearful saturnalia which have already immolated two thirds of them, and which to this day fill the streets of every town and village in the colony with drunkenness and debauchery.

They congregated in the towns in small, confined, and loathsome apartments, living or half-starving on any refuse they could procure in idleness, in lieu of the generous and plentiful meals supplied by their late masters. They planted themselves in wretched filthy huts covered with old hides, decayed rags, rotten sugar-bags, and dirty thatch, through which came rain and wind to chill the miserable occupants. From these places they issued but seldom, and then to earn only a stray shilling for some trivial service, and to purchase with it fresh drink to continue their debauch. Who shall tell of the horrible scenes of fiendish depravity these huts and dens exhibited?

Pestilence followed. Measles and small-pox assailed them in forms unknown in our own country. Nothing could check the fearful progress of these diseases as they seized on the impoverished, and weakened, and debauched Negro and Hottentot. The plague was not so destructive in England as were these maladies among the coloured classes at the Cape. They died not alone in their huts in the towns and villages, but on the roadsides, as they wandered they knew not whither; in the open fields; in miserable cabins (which were obliged to be burnt over the decaying remains of the dead).

It would be impossible to estimate correctly the number destroyed by this dreadful visitation. Suffice it to say that the coloured races in South Africa were visibly decreased by it; and that if it were not actually engendered by the state in which those races were then living, it was at least frightfully augmented in its disastrous results by the exposed condition in which the Emancipation Act had placed them-by their removal from the guardianship of those whom self-interest, as well as every better and gentler feeling would have prompted to protect and aid them.

So far for the evils wrought upon the slaves themselves-evils which have not passed away, but whose dire effects are but too visible to this hour. As for their masters-ungathered vintages, fallow fields, crops rotten on the ground, untended flocks, unserved tables, and labour-lacking warehouses these were a few of the evils experienced by the colonists. The Dutch, who had pursued agriculture, were literally ruined. They could not get a labourer to aid them. The progress of the colony was fearfully retarded by it, and it has not to this day recovered from the shock.

It was natural that the Dutch farmers-men of no great education, of no very far-seeing minds-should look with an evil eye on the government which had thus ruined their prospects. They were conscious of no

evil in regard to their own conduct to their slaves; and they could not see why their rulers should deprive them of a species of property which had produced good fruit both to the master and the serf. It was useless to argue on the abstract principle with men who were accustomed to look to the immediate effect for the test of what was right or wrong. "Am I the better for this emancipation?" said Mynheer. Indisputably no. "Are they the better for it-look and answer?" We fear not. "Then it is a wrong, and an injustice, and a robbery."

Another subject of complaint among the boers was, the abolition of the Commando system against the Kafirs. I shall have to speak of this hereafter, when I visit my old friends, the last-named gentry. I will merely observe here, that whatever might have been the defects of that system, it enabled the frontier farmer to protect himself against the violence or rapine of his savage neighbours-a desideratum which no other system has yet attained.

The Dutch are a very religious people. Whatever may be their distance from a place of worship, they never fail to keep the Sabbath-day with all due observances.

Some portion of the Bible, too, is read every evening in almost every boer's household, before all the family and the domestic servants. It is not one of the least pleasurable sights in the colony to behold assembled, in the large room of the principal dwelling in a Dutch homestead, a whole family, numbering perhaps forty or fifty, from the grey-headed grandsire to the flaxen-headed infant, listening with devout attention to the hallowed words of the Sacred Book, and joining in prayer and praise to the great Father of the whole human family.

Four times a year the sacrament is administered in every Dutch church in the colony. And then, from far and wide, the wagons pour into the towns bringing families who have travelled even one hundred and fifty miles to partake of the Lord's Supper. New Year's Day is always one of these occasions: it is a general holiday throughout the land, and is indeed the most sacred day in the Dutch calendar. Α stranger would imagine that some fête or great entertainment, some fair or festival, had drawn together the crowds of young and old assembled in the towns on this day. Little would he imagine that they had been summoned there only by the recollection of the divine words" This do in remembrance of me."

Upon the whole, the reader will see that I entertain a high opinion of the Dutch colonists at the Cape. They have many serious faults doubtless-they are the faults of their phlegmatic progenitors, and of their cousins in Holland at this day. But they have, at the same time, a large share of those sterling good qualities which make men respectable in the highest sense of the word, throughout the world. These good qualities they equally derive from Holland-thus witnessing that to races, as well as to individuals, may be applied the old Roman's maxim:

"Cœlum, non animum, mutant qui trans mare currunt."

MY FIRST VISIT " TO THE ROCK."

In order fully to appreciate the balmy influence of the "soft South," the wanderer should leave our northern shores, whilst stern unrelenting winter still holds them fast within his iron grasp.

In the act of thus flying from the stern tyrant's wrath, his frozen breath now angrily sped forth, will no doubt pursue us far o'er the rolling billows of the furrowed deep. It is, however, consolatory to know, that the rude blast which then bellies out our swelling sails-the foamcrested wave following so threateningly in the vessel's eddying wake — even the bounding motion of the gallant bark (oft so subversive of the poor landsman's peace of mind): it is pleasing then to reflect, that all these undoubted evidences of the frigid, ice-bound north, are rapidly bearing you off from the influence of its hyperborean sway, to milder regions and to sunnier climes.

Such were the feelings-as towards the end of a severe winter, passed in exile during my professional career, amidst the fens and bogs of that northern Celtic nation, as Tasso calls it, l' ultimo del mondo—

"Whom Ireland, from our world divided far,

From savage woods and mountains, sends to war;"

such were the feelings uppermost in my breast, as on a crowded troopship's deck and propelled by a stiff north-easterly breeze, I found myself rapidly receding from the "Emerald Isle," immortalized as above, by the classic pen of the Arezzan bard.

"On, on the vessel flies, the land is gone,

And winds are rude in Biscay's sleepless bay."

And most truly hath the poet averred, that a "devil of a sea runs in that bay," though he probably never had the advantage I then enjoyed, of dancing o'er "its glad billows" in an old, cranky, rotten, nearly unseaworthy and overcrowded craft, conveying troops, women, children, and stores the whole investment being most recklessly consigned by our magnanimous rulers, to the tender mercies of the winds, the waves, and an all-protecting Providence, whilst thus sent forth on the world of waters, during an inclement season of the year, to find its way as best it might, to one of our military stations in the Mediterranean sea.

Thus whilst we pet and pamper the offscourings of our hulks and jails our convicted felons, during their passage to the most genial regions of the globe-such is the treatment too frequently vouchsafed to the gallant defenders of our domestic hearths, whilst consigned to banishment too often, alas! for life in some tropical, pestilential, and remote corner of the globe!

And then, oh! the miseries to be endured on board of one of those floating coffins, usually appropriated on such occasions, for the conveyance of her Majesty's loyal and devoted troops!

The "grey-eyed morn had dawned on the eleventh day since our departure from the Cove of Cork, when the joyful sound of "land ahead" was passed from mouth to mouth by all on board.

A gentle south-westerly breeze, slowly creeping over the bosom of the now calm and tranquil Atlantic, and barely filling our crowded sails,

carried us smoothly and almost imperceptibly towards the entrance of that far-famed strait, oft recorded in the classic fables of yore, and where the "Columns of Hercules" record to the present day the locality of that most gigantic task of the son of Alcinena, when he is supposed to have liberated the captive Naïads and Tritons closely pent up within the waters of the "Midland Sea," by wrenching the rugged Calpe from the grasp of old Atlas, and hurling it wide apart from its twin sister Abila, to the other side of the "Fretum Gaditanum," the present well-known Gibraltar Straits.

Calpe and Abila! primeval, gigantic records of the past! imperishable monuments planted by some convulsive effort of Nature, or some fearful throe of old Mother Earth! on whose rugged surface thus stands forth, so clearly chiselled out, and in such unmistakable characters, the most remarkable facts in the history of mankind!

On "opening" the Straits of Gibraltar, what a volume of history is likewise suddenly opened to the most unimaginative mind!

Whilst contemplating the "Rock of Taric," and the "Hill of Apes -whilst turning from civilized Europe to Afric's barbarous shores, to its unexplored extent of swamps and forest-of arid wilderness and desert-sands the bewildered mind is fairly lost in the vain attempt to scan at a single glance, so vast a page of history combined with fable -a page so thickly studded with the records of long intervening events, even from remotest antiquity unto the present day!

Europa,+ on one hand, still borne up amidst the waves-laved alternately by the blue waters of the Mediterranean and the spray of the Atlantic billows,-on the other, the Numidian and Carthaginian shore, far stretching to the East, amidst a host of still wild "barbaric" tribes: whichever way we turn, history, poetry, and mythology, all tend to recall the pleasing classic associations of our early schoolboy and college days! Herodotus and Homer, Ovid and Virgil, become once more on such a scene our most friendly and familiar associates.

Phoenicians and Carthaginians crowd in fanciful imagery upon the scene; their galleys pass us through the Straits, bound in quest of the rude products of at that remote period-our own Savage Isles, proceeding to the "ultima Thule" of the north, to where our ancestors then wandered in primeval forests, clad in the hides of animals of the chase:

"Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos."

Hannibal, with his Carthaginian host, increased by swarthy tribes of wild Brebers and Numidian horse, may next be seen in innumerable galleys, of the first navy of the ancient world, now crossing this narrow sea; whilst Iberia recoils in affright as the huge, ungainly elephant-the modern mammoth-first plants its foot upon her shores.

But Hannibal returns-Scipio shows himself upon the scene-the queenly city of Dido is no more the exiled Roman reposes on its ruined walls,-Jugurtha, and Masinissa, and Belisarius, follow each other rapidly over that stage, whence Carthaginians, and Numidians

*The appellation of Gibraltar is derived from an Arabic word signifying the "Hill of Taric;" whilst the opposite promontory of Abila is often called the "Hill of Apes," from the number of those animals frequenting it, and which are said to have come thence to the rock of Gibraltar, through a subterranean passage across the Straits.

+ Point Europa, the southernmost promontory of Europe.