and she was at once in such sympathy with the Kaffirs
that it was a playful arrangement among the home party that Anne should
be the white and Alice the black sister.

Just after her arrival, it was determined that the Archdeacon should
leave Durban, where, indeed, he had been only filling the post of an
absent clergyman, and take a district on the Umhlali river, forty miles
from Durban, containing a number of English settlements, a camp, and a
large amount of Kaffir kraals. Every Sunday he had five services at
different places, one of them eighteen miles from the nearest, a space
that had to be ridden at speed in the mid-day sun. There was no house,
but a couple of rooms with perpendicular sides and a verandah, one for
chapel, the other for sitting-room, while Kaffir beehive huts were the
bedrooms of all. For a long time blankets and plaids did the part of
doors and shutters; and just as the accommodations were improving, the
whole grass and wattle structure was burnt down, and it was many months
before the tardy labour of colonial workmen enabled the family to take
possession of the new house, in a better situation, which they named
Seaforth, after the title of the former head of the Mackenzie clan.

All this time the whole party had been working. A school was collected
every morning of both boys and girls; not many in number, but from a
large area: children of white settlers, varying in rank, gentlemen or
farmers, but all alike running wild for want of time and means to
instruct them. They came riding on horses or oxen, attended by their
Kaffirs, and were generally found exceedingly ignorant of all English
learning, but precocious and independent in practical matters: young boys
able to shoot, ride, and often entrusted with difficult commissions by
their fathers at an age when their cousins at home would scarcely be at a
public school, and little girls accustomed to superintend the Kaffirs in
all household business; both far excelling their parents in familiarity
with the language, but accustomed to tyrannize over the black servants,
and in danger of imbibing unsuspected evil from their heathen converse.
It was a task of no small importance to endeavour to raise the tone,
improve the manners, and instruct the minds of these young colonists, and
it could only be attempted by teaching them as friends upon an equality.

With the Kaffirs, at the same time, the treatment was moulded on that of
Mr. and Mrs. Robertso