kindly received by the gentlemen who superintend
the works. The house used to belong to some Boer, who had deserted
the place, but left behind him a beautiful orchard of orange and peach
trees. The place is very feverish and unhealthy, and the white ants
so troublesome that everything has to be stood in sardine tins full of
ashes.

On our way from the house we went to see the cobalt mine, which is on
a hillside a mile away. It has only been established about three years,
and has existed hitherto under the greatest difficulties as regards
labour, transport, machinery, danger from surrounding native tribes,
&c.; but it has already, the proprietor informed me, reduced the price
of cobalt--the blue dye used to colour such things as the willow-pattern
plates--by one-half in the English market, bringing it down from
somewhere about 140 pounds to 80 pounds a ton. We were very much
astonished to see the amount of work which had been done, as we expected
to find a pit such as the Kafirs work for copper, but instead of that
there was a large slanting shaft quite a hundred yards long, to say
nothing of various openings out of it following branch leads of ore.
There is also a vertical shaft one hundred feet deep, through which the
ore comes up, and by which one can ascend and descend in a bucket. After
we emerged from this awful hole, we went into another, a drive running
straight into the mountain for more than three hundred feet, following a
vein of black oxide of cobalt, which is much more valuable than the ore;
and, though the vein is rarely more than a foot in thickness, pays
very well. Leaving the mine, we rode on past some old Kafir
copper-workings--circular pits--which must have been abandoned, to judge
from their appearance, a hundred years ago, till we came to the banks
of the great "Olifants'" or "Elephants'" river. This magnificent stream,
though it is unnavigable owing to frequent rapids, has stretches miles
long, down which a man-of-war could steam, and after its junction with
the Elands' River it grows larger and larger till, pursuing a north-east
course, it at length falls into the mighty Limpopo. It is a very
majestic but somewhat sluggish stream, and its water is not very good.
You cannot see the river till you are right upon it, owing to the great
trees with which its steep banks are fringed, and in the early morning
it is quite hidden from bank to bank by a dense mass of billows of white
mist, indescribably str