Mr Nicholson's location included a tolerable house with mud floors and reed ceilings, and thirty-five thousand acres of mountain and plain, having the reputation of one of the best farms in the district. The cost of this was about £2000; and the property was calculated to maintain five or six thousand sheep, four hundred oxen, besides horses. There were four small springs, allowing the cultivation of about sixteen acres of good soil. Mr Nicholson, not wishing to overburden the land, bought only three thousand sheep, with cattle in proportion, and began the life (described by him as most discouraging and unprofitable) of a Cape of Good Hope sheep-farmer. Melancholy indeed is the account he gives of the profits and losses of that occupation. In the first place, high wages and good keep are scarcely sufficient inducement to the lazy Hottentots to take service; and when they are prevailed upon, they are scarce worth having. They are sent to the hills with the flocks, which they have to protect from beasts of prey, always on the look-out for a bit of straggling mutton. They themselves, however, are conspicuous for their rapacity, and by no means remarkable for honesty; and doubtless many a stray sheep is debited to the hyenas, of whose disappearance the Hottentots could give a very good account. The wild animals, however--panthers, jackals, hyenas, and, in some districts, lions--are amongst the settler's worst foes. These prowling carnivora preclude the possibility of leaving sheep out of doors after dark; and, even when penned, the fleecy family can hardly be considered safe. "In stormy weather," saith Nicholson, "my walled pens, although well bushed at top, and above six feet high, did not sufficiently protect me from great losses by the hyenas, which, on such occasions, would often jump over and kill sheep, and often carry one off in their mouths." This latter feat is rather astounding; but no matter, let us pass on to the next grievances of the unfortunate settler and sheep-farmer, grievances not peculiar to himself, but shared by all whose evil star guides them to the land of locusts and hyena. The diseases of sheep are numerous and fatal--scab, consumptive wasting, inflammation of the lungs, violent inflammatory epidemics, poisonous bushes and hailstones, drought and thunderbolts. "I recollect one of my neighbours losing upwards of three hundred valuable sheep in a few minutes from the effects of a hailstorm. Another farmer, living at no great distance from me, lost fifteen hundred sheep in one season from drought; and on my own farm, shortly before I became possessed of it, four hundred sheep were destroyed by lightning in a moment." Doubtless such mishaps as these do occur, but there is something particularly painful in Mr Nicholson's lugubrious style of piling them up, without intermixture of the smallest crumb of comfort for any unhappy individuals planning emigration to the Cape. Did he but vaunt the