ago used to see the grim headland loom up through the clouds driven by
the strong south-easters, that kept them struggling for days or weeks to
round the cape that marked their way to India. But Sir Francis Drake,
who passed it coming home westward from his ever-famous voyage round the
world, had a more auspicious experience: "We ran hard aboard the Cape,
finding the report of the Portuguese to be most false, who affirm that
it is the most dangerous cape of the world, never without intolerable
storms and present danger to travellers who come near the same. This
cape is a most stately thing, and the finest cape we saw in the whole
circumference of the earth."

A third excursion, which well repays the traveller, is to the quaint
little town of Stellenbosch, founded by Adrian van der Stel (Governor of
the Colony) in 1680, and called after himself and his wife, whose name
was Bosch. It is built in genuine Dutch style, with straight streets of
two-storied white houses, the windows nearly flush with the walls as in
Holland, the wood-work and the green shutters those of Holland, and long
lines of dark-green oaks shading the foot-walks on each side the street.
Soft, rich pastures all round--for there is plenty of water brought down
from the hills--complete the resemblance to a Hobbema landscape; and it
is only when one looks up and sees rocky mountains soaring behind into
the sky that the illusion is broken. It is here, and in the town of
Swellendam, farther east, and in some of the villages that lie northward
of Stellenbosch in the western province, that the Dutch element has
remained strongest and has best retained its ancient ways and customs.

We have, however, delayed long enough round the capital, and it is time
to plunge into the interior by the railway. Sixty miles to the north of
Cape Town, the trunk-line, which has threaded its way through the
valleys of an outlying range of mountains, reaches the foot of the great
inner table-land at a place called Hex River, and in an hour climbs by
zigzags up an incline which is in some places as steep as one in
thirty-five, mounting 1600 feet into a desert land. Rugged brown
mountains, sometimes craggy, sometimes covered with masses of loose
stone, rise above the lower ground, now a valley, now an open plain,
through which the railway takes its eastward way. The bushes, which had
been tall and covered with blossoms on the ascent, are now stunted,
bearing small and usually withered