hat has recently
become our own. Its present aspect, and its prospects for the
future, are best learnt from authorities who have personally
inspected the place. Mr. Charles Boyd discourses thus on the
subject:--

"When you have got out of the train before the corrugated iron
building which stands on the edge of the illimitable grey, green
veldt, to mark where the great station of the future is to arise,
there is one feature of Buluwayo which is making ready to seize hold
upon you. It is not, perhaps, the most important feature, but it is
conspicuous enough to entitle it to a first place in any jotting of
local impressions. It is what a logician might call the
_differentia_ of Buluwayo. Put it bluntly it comes to this, that you
have arrived in a community of gentlemen. A stranger making his way
about the brown streets, neat brick and corrugated iron buildings
set down on red earth, and divided into alternate avenues and
streets--'little New York,' said a policeman complacently--a
stranger pauses to ask himself if he dreams, or if the Household
Brigade, the Bachelors' Club, and the Foreign Office have depleted
themselves of their members, and sent them, disguised in
broad-brimmed hats and riding-breeches, to hold the capital of
Matabeleland. Young men of the most eligible sort are everywhere.
Some of them are manifestly youthful, others are well on in the
thirties, there is even a sprinkling of men of years; but the mass
of the population presents the same aspect of physical fitness, that
indefinable something besides, which is perhaps not to be expressed
save under the single head of 'race.'" In fact, our authority
asserts that nowhere can be found a healthier, shrewder, or
friendlier set of men. He believes in them, and in the discipline
that has toughened them to meet the real needs of life, and kept
them alive to a sense of their political and social importance. He
says--

"Buluwayo now possesses a population of 5000, a mayor and
corporation, daily and weekly papers, and several public buildings,
including banks, clubs, and an hospital built as a memorial to Major
Wilson.

"The rapid increase in the value of land at Buluwayo is shown by the
fact that whilst in 1894 the average price of a town stand was L103,
in 1897 it had advanced to L345. By the opening of the railway, in
November 1897, it is placed in direct communication with Cape
Town, and a still greater increase in value may be anticipated."

[Illustrat