irty-one mile ride in to within two miles of town if I would
only wait for a construction train. I declined in my stupid
sentimentality. For one thing I hate breaking up a plan of
combined foot-travel; it seems to me hard on one's native
fellow-travelers, on whom one is apt to call for big efforts. To
ride on ahead, and leave them struggling alone with the sandy
monster of a road for any long distance, seems vile desertion,
and I was by no means sure that the invitation to board the train
included them. Moreover, this might be my last journey in, on the
old road, under the old order.

So I declined, but I lunched with Charles Miller Before I went
on. Marvell was there, the Kaffir store-keeper from ten miles
away. He had much to tell me of his wonderful good luck. The
big firm that were putting up the new Store at Alexandra, that
rail-head terminus designate, had asked him to manage it.

He could marry now on his prospects. He had wanted to see me, and
had waylaid me on my road. The bride was due by coach to-morrow.
He hoped to get a Special License when once she had arrived.
Would I marry them on Monday?

We had a good lunch with healths afterwards, but they let me
drink them in tea. Miller proposed the health of the bridegroom,
to whom the railway, or ever it came, had brought luck. Might his
luck last while the rails lasted, and grow heavier when they
should be replaced by heavier metals! Might he never make less in
a year than that railway had cost per mile! 'Three thousand five
hundred will take some making,' Marvell sighed to me. He
acknowledged the toast and proposed the Railway's prosperity. He
grew rather florid to my thinking, about the benefit to the
District how Kaffir gardens were to be displaced by up-to-date
farming, how tourists were to pour in athirst to explore its
ruins. He discoursed of the blessedness of ranching, and of
chrome and asbestos syndicates. He said that we were in at the
death alike of malaria, of blackwater, and horse-sickness. Then I
spoke up for the other side. I asked them to remember the old Era
in silence, and if they must drink, to drink to the transport-road
and the transport-riders, and to all pioneers, and old hands
going and gone, to the big native district and its dependencies,
so rich in cattle and so rich in grain, to God's Eden of a
country, and the people that He Himself had chosen to set there
to dress it, and to keep it before our coming. My toast fell
rather flat,