No wonder that, when the difficulty of
bringing up machinery is so great, impatient mine-owners long for the
railway.

The first sign that we were close upon Gwelo came from the sight of a
number of white men in shirt-sleeves running across a meadow--an unusual
sight in South Africa, which presently explained itself as the English
inhabitants engaged in a cricket match. Nearly the whole town was either
playing or looking on. It was a hot afternoon, but our energetic
countrymen were not to be scared by the sun from the pursuit of the
national game. They are as much Englishmen in Africa as in England, and,
happily for them and for their country, there is no part of the national
character that is more useful when transplanted than the fondness for
active exercise. Gwelo, a cheerful little place, though it stands in a
rather bleak country, with a wooded ridge a little way off to the south,
interested me as a specimen of the newest kind of settlement. It is not
in strictness a mining camp, for there are no reefs in the immediate
neighbourhood, but a mining centre, which proposes to live as the local
metropolis of a gold-bearing district, a place of supply and seat of
local administration. In October, 1895, it had about fifteen houses
inhabited by Europeans and perhaps thirty houses altogether; but the
materials for building other houses were already on the ground, and the
usual symptoms of a "boom" were discernible. Comparing it with the many
similar "new cities" I had seen in Western America, I was much struck
with the absence of the most conspicuous features of those cities--the
"saloons" and "bars." In California or Montana these establishments, in
which the twin deities of gambling and drinking are worshipped with
equal devotion, form half the houses of a recent settlement in a mining
region. In South Africa, except at and near Johannesburg, one scarcely
sees them. Drinking rarely obtrudes itself. What gambling there may be I
know not, but at any rate there are no gambling-saloons. Nothing can be
more decorous than the aspect of these new African towns, and the
conduct of the inhabitants seldom belies the aspect. There is, of
course, a free use of alcohol. But there is no shooting, such as goes on
in American mining towns: crimes of violence of any kind are extremely
rare; and the tracks are safe. No one dreams of taking the precautions
against "road-agents" (_i.e._ highwaymen) which are still far from
superfluous in th