potency.

Crossing Laing's Nek,--the top of which few future travellers will
tread, because the railway passes in a tunnel beneath it,--one comes out
on the north upon the great rolling plateau which stretches to the
Zambesi in one direction and to the Atlantic in another. Four or five
miles further, a little beyond the village of Charleston, one leaves
Natal and enters the South African Republic; and here is the actual
watershed which divides the upper tributaries of the Orange River from
the streams which flow to the Indian Ocean. The railway had just been
completed at the time of our visit, and though it was not opened for
traffic till some weeks later, we were allowed to run over it to the
point where it joins the great line from Cape Town to Pretoria. The
journey was attended with some risk, for in several places the permanent
way had sunk, and in others it had been so insecurely laid that our
locomotive and car had to pass very slowly and cautiously. The country
is so sparsely peopled that if one did not know it was all taken up in
large grazing-farms, one might suppose it still a wilderness. Here and
there a few houses are seen, and one place, Heidelberg, rises to the
dignity of a small town, being built at the extreme south-eastern end of
the great Witwatersrand gold-basin, where a piece of good reef is
worked, and a mining population has begun to gather. The country is all
high, averaging 5000 feet above sea level, and is traversed by ridges
which rise some 500 to 1000 feet more. It is also perfectly bare, except
for thorny mimosas scattered here and there, with willows fringing the
banks of the few streams.

Great is the contrast when, on reaching Elandsfontein, on the main line
of railway, one finds one's self suddenly in the midst of the stir and
bustle of industrial life. Here are the tall chimneys of engine-houses;
here huge heaps of refuse at the shafts of the mines mark the direction
across the country of the great gold-reef. Here, for the first time
since he quitted the suburbs of Cape Town, the traveller finds himself
again surrounded by a dense population, filled with the eagerness, and
feeling the strain and stress, of an industrial life like that of the
manufacturing communities of Europe or of North America. Fifteen years
ago there was hardly a sign of human occupation. The Boer ranchman sent
out his native boys to follow the cattle as they wandered hither and
thither, seeking scanty pasturage amo