instance, is quite a feature in the landscape, and from here one cannot perceive that the clock does not go.  Nothing can be prettier than the effect of the red-tiled roofs and white walls peeping out from among thick clumps of trees, whilst beyond the ground rises again to low hills with deep purple fissures and clefts in their green sides.  It is only a couple of years since this little house was built and the garden laid out, and yet the shrubs and trees are as big as if half a dozen years had passed over their leafy heads.  As for the roses, I never saw anything like the way they flourish at their own sweet will.  Scarcely a leaf is to be seen on the ugly straggling tree—­nothing but masses of roses of every tint and kind and old-fashioned variety.  The utmost I can do in the way of gathering daily basketsful appears only in the light of judicious pruning, and next day a dozen blossoms have burst forth to supply the place of each theft of mine.  And there is such a variety of trees!  Oaks and bamboos, blue gums and deodars, seem to flourish equally well within a yard or two of each other, and the more distant flower-beds are filled with an odd mixture of dahlias and daturas, white fleur-de-lis and bushy geraniums, scarlet euphorbias and verbenas.  But the weeds!  They are a chronic eyesore and grief to every gardener.  On path and grass-plat, flower-bed and border, they flaunt and flourish.  “Jack,” the Zulu refugee, wages a feeble and totally inadequate warfare against them with a crooked hoe, but he is only a quarter in earnest, and stops to groan and take snuff so often that the result is that our garden is precisely in the condition of the garden of the sluggard, gate and all.  This hingeless condition of the gate, however, is, I must in fairness state, neither Jack’s nor our fault.  It is a new gate, but no one will come out from the town to hang it.  That is my standing grievance.  Because we live about a mile from the town it is next to impossible to get anything done.  The town itself is one of the shabbiest assemblages of dwellings I have ever seen in a colony.  It is not to be named on the same day with Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, New Zealand, which ten years ago was decently paved and well lighted by gas.  Poor sleepy Maritzburg consists now, at more than forty years of age (Christchurch is not twenty-five yet), of a few straight, wide, grass-grown streets, which are only picturesque at a little distance on account of their having trees on each side.  On particularly dark nights a dozen oil-lamps standing at long intervals apart are lighted, but when it is even moderately starlight these aids to finding one’s way about are prudently dispensed with.  There is not a single handsome and hardly a decent building in the whole place.  The streets, as I saw them after rain, are veritable sloughs of despond, but they are capable of being changed by dry weather into deserts of dust.  It is true, I have only been as yet twice down to the town, but