obscured, but with their light grey filmy veil, added beauty to the mountains to which they yet clung. They lay in the deep valley below me, like the calmness of an inland lake; the reflection of the sky and mountains seemed to sleep upon it, so perfect was the deception. Who can wonder, I thought, that the sun should have been worshipped?

This last adventure was not altogether agreeable, but to me there is a pleasure in my solitary rides; there is companionship in the wild flowers, in the dark green heaths, and their rich purple blossoms; in the bright plumaged birds, and the shy and many-coloured lizards disappearing in the crevices of the rock; in the cameleon, dark in the shade, but taking the bright sunny-green hue of the shrub which with slow languid movement it climbs. There is a voice that speaks from the wave, that breaks in foam beneath me, and in the mass of cloud that journeys above.

You will tell me this is idle dreaming; but there are times in which I fly society to in

at

dulge in such dreams, and to recall the vivid impressions of childhood-even the memory of which is more real than the things now passing. It is the scene of early morning, with its bright beautiful lights and deep shadows, when compared to which all that follows is dim, and tame, and lifeless. Do you remember our cricket when the summer-day was not long enough for our game, and we played until we could no longer see the ball? and in after-years our wanderings around the lakes, and amidst the mountains of Killarney and Glengarriffe? I know not why the recollections have entered my mind, for these openings of the past obey not our will; they come uncalled, and we cannot trace the spell that has raised the dead, and they frequently come but to add to the bitterness of regret; for there are few who can calmly look back to their days of thoughtless childhood.

LETTER III.

Graham's Town.-Population.-Situation.-Poortes.-State of Agriculture. - Produce-Waggons of the Boors.-Duchany, a Kaffer Chief.-Begging.-Different Animals. - Elephant-hunting.-Singular Adventure.-The Orange River.-The Chief Chaka.-The Kaffers. Depredations committed by the Border-tribes.

How short a time can change our abode, our pursuits, and our companions! Three days and a gale of wind have done it for me, and I am now seven hundred miles from the Cape, at Graham's Town, the capital of Albany, which is the eastern frontier of the colony, bordering on Kafferland.

In this part of the country, the settlers who left England for Africa some years since, were located, that is, had grants of land bestowed upon them, and the population is almost wholly English.

Graham's Town, now a large, ugly, ill-built, straggling place, containing, I should think, nearly three thousand inhabitants and soldiers, was a few years back only a military post, and the mimosa tree stands in the principal street, beneath which, it is said, the first English officer, Colonel Graham, who led a military party there, pitched his tent. Colonel Graham is dead, and the second town in the colony bears his name,-a name that is often mentioned, and always with respect.

Houses have sprung up quickly of every variety of form, and barracks, and a church for the established faith, and chapels for all sects-Dissenters, Wesleyans, Anabaptists, Independents, &c. and last, not least, the handsomest building, and the most necessary, is a gaol.

The population is a strange mixture of lounging officers, idle tradesmen, (merchants, I beg their pardon,) drunken soldiers, and still more drunken settlers.

We have high authority for saying, that

"your Dane, your German, and your swagbellied Hollander, drink, ho! are nothing to your English," and the English of Southern Africa have not degenerated, if fiery visages, sun-scorched and brandy-scorched, may vouch for them.

We have a circulating-library and a fashionable tailor, whose shopboard announces that he comes from the Quadrant. Piano-forte tuners, a seminary for young ladies, and an artist, who in England was employed to copy Varley's drawings, and who succeeded, by his own account, so well, as to have his copies always mistaken for the originals; but, alas! Africa affords no encouragement to art; he lives in a mud-hovel, hawks about his drawings in vain, and his pencil fails to keep him in Cape brandy.

A book of melancholy amusement might be written, contrasting the romantic expectations of the first settlers with the squalid reality of their present state.