Kimberley has risen with immense speed, commencing from what is generally known as a "rush," to a large and prosperous centre of wealth, trade, and commerce. There, where only a few years since, was to be found a collection of tents and small huts, I found a city with handsome buildings, churches, stores, institutions, and law courts, and, above all, a well ordered society. Some of the buildings which I might specially mention, are the Town Hall, the Post Office, the High Court, and the Public Library, which has been in existence about seven years, and is superintended with such excellent results and most gratifying success by the Judge President. One noticeable fact connected with this Library is that the number of works of fiction annually taken out by the subscribers, exceeds, per head of the population, that of any Public Library in the United Kingdom. The Kimberley Waterworks, which I also visited, have proved a great boon to this part, of the Colony. They were erected at a cost of L400,000, the water supply being obtained from the Vaal River, seventeen miles away. After spending a most pleasant and agreeable week there, I left Kimberley at six o'clock on the morning of June 7, in a wagon drawn by eight horses, and accompanied by five friends, for Warrenton, _en route_ for Bechuanaland and the Transvaal. This mode of travelling was quite a novelty to me. Although in this journey of altogether three weeks' duration, we occasionally put up at one or two hotels, at some of the towns, and sometimes at the farmhouses on our way, we frequently "camped out" on the open veldt, and, after finishing our evening meal of the rough-and-ready provisions we carried with us, supplemented by the game we shot, we wrapped ourselves in our karosses, and slept for the night under the canopy of the starlit sky. I occupied the wagon, my more juvenile companions lying on the ground beneath it. This was my first experience of sleeping in the open air in a wagon, and this, too, in the depth of a South African winter. The town of Warrenton is situated on the banks of the Vaal River, and is forty-three miles north of Kimberley. It is at present an unimportant town, but diamond diggings have been recently opened, and it is a good cattle district. It took its name from Sir Charles Warren. Soon after leaving Warrenton we crossed the Vaal River on a pontoon. Here a trooper of the Mounted Police joined us, who was said to be a very crack shot. He rode a charming and well-bred grey horse, and had two admirably trained pointers with him. He offered me his horse to ride, he taking my place in the wagon. I had a most enjoyable morning's ride on one of the best little hacks I ever mounted, cantering over the veldt in the track of the wagon for about eight or ten miles--through a charming country with a superb view towards Bechuanaland, the veldt being more wooded and picturesque, than I had hitherto seen.