November 3; and at Bulawayo, 1360 miles, at 9:30 a.m. on November 4, which would be ninety hours at fifteen miles per hour.

It took us an hour to cross the Lowry Strait, which at no very distant period must have been covered by sea and separated the Cape Peninsula from the Continent.

At 5:30 we arrived at the Paarl, 35 miles, a beautiful place suggestive of Italy with its vineyards, gardens and shrubbery, and lovingly enfolded by the Drakenstein Range. With its groves of fir and eucalyptus, bright sunshine, and pleasant-faced people, with picturesque mountains round about, it seemed a most desirable place.

The Paarl Station and others we passed bear witness to the excellence of Cape railway administration. The names of the stations were boldly printed on japanned iron plates, and though the passage of so many trains crowded with distinguished strangers had drawn large assemblages of the Colonists, male and female, whites, mulattoes, and negroes, the cleanliness and orderliness that prevailed were very conspicuous.

A Message to Mr Labouchere.

At 6 p.m. we had passed Wellington, 45 miles, which went to prove the rate of travel. This town also drew from us admiring expressions for its picturesque situation in one of the folds of the Drakenstein, for the early summer green of its groves, vineyards, and fields, and its pretty white houses. I thought, as I marked the charming town and its church spires, and the sweet groves around, what a contrast it was to the time when the Hottentot reared his cattle in the valley, and the predatory bushman infested the neighbourhood, and preyed on ground game and goats.

On the platform, among those who welcomed our coming, were a dozen Radical shoemakers lately arrived from Leicester. They charged Colonel Saunderson, M.P., my fellow traveller, with an expressive message to Mr Labouchere. It is too forcible and inelegant for print, but it admirably illustrates the rapidity with which Radicals become perverted by travel.

Darkness found the train labouring through the mountainous defile of the Hex River. We could see but a loom of the rugged heights on either side, but from all accounts this part of the line is one of the show places which strangers are asked to note.

At daylight we were well on the Karroo, which at first sight was all but a desert. However, we were not long on it before we all took to it kindly. The air was strangely appetising, and we could not help regarding it with benevolence. The engineers who designed the line must have been skilful men, and by the track, as the train curves in and out of narrowing valleys and broadening plains, we are led to suppose that the Continent slopes gently from the interior down to Table Bay. The railway is a surface line, without a single tunnel or any serious cutting. The gradients in some places are stiff, but a single engine finds no difficulty in surmounting them.

At 4 p.m. of November 1 we reached the 458th mile from Cape Town, so that our rate of travel had been nineteen miles the hour. On tolerably level parts our speed, as timed by watch, was thirty miles; stoppages and steep gradients reduce this to nineteen miles.

We were fast asleep by the time we reached Kimberley. Night, and the short pause we made, prevented any correct impressions of the chief city of the Diamond Fields. At half-past six of November 2 we woke up at Taungs, 731 miles. The small stream over which we entered the late Crown Colony of Bechuanaland serves as a frontier line between it and Griqualand.

The Capabilities of Bechuanaland.

The first view of the country reminded me of East Central Africa, and I looked keenly at it to gauge its capabilities. To a new-comer it would not seem so full of promise as it was to me. It would appear as a waterless region, and too dry for a man accustomed to green fields and flowing rivers, but I have seen nothing between the immediate neighbourhood of the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains to surpass it, and each mile we travelled in Bechuanaland confirmed that impression. Every few miles we crossed dry watercourses; but, though there was no water in sight, it does not derogate from its value as farm land. The plateau of Persia is a naked desert compared to it, and yet Persia possesses eight millions of people, and at one time contained double that number. The prairies of Nebraska, of Colorado, and Kansas are inferior in appearance, and I have seen them in their uninhabited state, but to-day they are remarkable for the growth of their many cities and their magnificent farming estates. All that is wanted to render Bechuanaland a desirable colony is water, so that every farm might draw irrigating supplies from reservoirs along these numerous watercourses. For Nature has so disposed the land that anyone with observant eyes may see with what little trouble water could be converted into rich green pastures and fields bearing weighty grain crops. The track of the railway runs over broad, almost level, valleys, hemmed in by masses of elevated land which have been broken up by ages of torrential rains, and whose soil has been swept by the floods over the valleys, naturally leaving the bases of the mountains higher than the central depression. If a Persian colonist came here he would say: “How admirable for my purpose! I shall begin my draining ditches or canauts from the bases of those hills and train them down towards the lower parts of these valleys, by which time I shall have as many constant and regular running streams as I have ditches, and my flocks and herds and fields shall have abundance of the necessary element.” A thousand of such Persians would create thus a central stream with the surplus water flowing along the valley, and its borders would become one continuous grove. As the Persians would do, the English colonists whose luck it may be to come to this land may also do, and enrich themselves faster than by labouring at gold mining.

These dry river-beds, now filled with sand, need only to have stone dams built across, every few hundred yards, to provide any number of reservoirs. They have been formed by rushing torrents which have furrowed the lowlands down to the bed rock, and the depth and breadth of the river courses show us what mighty supplies of water are wasted every year. As the torrents slackened their flow, they deposited their sediment, and finally filtered through underneath until no water was visible, but by digging down about two feet, it is found in liberal quantities, cool and sweet.

Even the improvident black has discovered what the greenness of the grass shows, that, though water is not visible, it is not far off. At one station the guards told me that they could find plenty of water by an hour’s digging, which was a marvel to many of our party. I was told in Khama’s territory that Khama, the chief, owned eight hundred thousand head of cattle before the rinderpest made its appearance and reduced his stock by half. If true, and there is no reason to doubt it, it shows what Bechuanaland might become with trifling improvements.

Mafeking.

Before we came to Vryburg, the continuous valley had broadened out into a prairie, with not a hill in sight. The face of the land was as bare as though ploughed. By 4 p.m. we had come to the 850th mile, showing that the rate during the last twenty-four hours had been sixteen and a third miles an hour. Since Taungs, 731 miles, we had been closely skirting the Transvaal frontier, while to the west of the line lay what was once the mission-field of Livingstone and Moffatt. An hour later we arrived at Mafeking, on the Moloppo River, a tributary of the Orange River. Mafeking will always be celebrated in the future as the place whence Jameson started on his desperate incursion into the Dutch Republic. The Moloppo River contains lengthy pools of water along its deepened course, but the inhabitants of Mafeking are supplied by copious springs from Montsioa’s old farm. The town lies on the north, or right bank,