ry dear
to buy and very difficult to keep and to feed. I don't even see many
cats, and a pet bird is a rarity. However, as we stood on the breezy
platform I saw a most beautiful wild bird fly over the rose-hedge just
below us. It was about as big as a crow, but with a strange iridescent
plumage. When it flitted into the sunshine its back and wings shone
like a rainbow, and the next moment it looked perfectly black and
velvety in the shade. Now a turquoise-blue tint comes out on its
spreading wings, and a slant in the sunshine turns the blue into a
chrysoprase green. Nobody could tell me its name: our Dutch host spoke
exactly like Hans Breitmann, and declared it was a "bid of a crow,"
and so we had to leave it and the platform and come down to more roses
and tea. There was so much yet to be seen and to be done that we could
not stay long, and, laden with magnificent bouquets of _gloire de
Dijon_ roses and honeysuckle, and divers strange and lovely flowers,
we drove off again in our Cape carts. I observed that instead of
saying "Whoa!" or checking the horses in anyway by the reins, the
driver always whistles to them--long, low whistle--and they stand
quite still directly. We bumped up and down, over extraordinarily
rough places, and finally slid down a steep cutting to the brink of
the river Buffalo, over which we were ferried, all standing, on a big
punt, or rather pontoon. A hundred yards or so of rapid driving then
took us to a sort of wharf which projected into the river, where the
important-looking little tug awaited us; and no sooner were we all
safely on board--rather a large party by this time, for we had gone
on picking up stragglers ever since we started, only three in number,
from the hotel--than she sputtered and fizzed herself off up-stream.
By this time it was the afternoon, and I almost despair of making
you see the woodland beauty of that broad mere, fringed down to the
water's edge on one side with shrubs and tangle of roses and woodbine,
with ferns and every lovely green creeping thing. That was on the bank
which was sheltered from the high winds: the other hillside showed the
contrast, for there, though green indeed, only a few feathery tufts
of pliant shrubs had survived the force of some of these south-eastern
gales. We paddled steadily along in mid-stream, and from the bridge
(where little G---- and I had begged "Capting Florence" to let us
stand) one could see the double of each leaf and tendril and