rifles and fowling-pieces for chief baggage, and with expectations of finding in the bush grand-pianos for their wives, and rocking-horses for their first-born, they are likely to be exceedingly discontented on discovering hard work and many privations to be the necessary conditions of life in a new country. But Mr Nicholson is evidently not one of those easily-pleased persons, who put up with present disagreeables in hopes of a more prosperous future. To be sure, he denies the possibility of any amount of energy, knowledge, and industry procuring the emigrant a settled and comfortable position. "When all this energy must be expended in an often vain effort to prevent loss, or to overcome difficulties, the control of which will only have a conservative, and not a progressive effect on the settler's circumstances, its constant exercise soon sickens, and the consequences will be despair and misery." We should put more faith in these deplorable accounts, were they supported by the evidence of other writers on the subject; but we know of none who partake Mr Nicholson's dismal views, at least to any thing like the same extent. And his whole book breathes a spirit of discontent and depreciation that makes us regard it with distrust, as the splenetic effusion of a man soured by ill success. With him, from Dan to Beersheba, all is barren; or, if exceptional fertility here and there prevails, it is neutralised by an accumulation of evils. "The farmer is, in this country, always checkmated, as it were, by the natural order of things: luxuriant-looking pasturage is of poisonous quality, and the more wholesome kinds scanty in quantity, and liable to be fatally diminished by dry seasons. Crops of corn and all kinds of vegetables grow most abundantly, and are cultivated at but little expense, in most parts of Albany; frequent and heavy losses in wheat crops, however, may be expected from the 'rust,' and less frequent and more partial destruction from the attacks of locusts. When a large general yield of grain occurs, it must be sold at a very low figure, as there is great difficulty in preserving it for better prices, for want of granaries and barns, which would be too expensive to erect, and would, after all, but ineffectually guarantee it from the attacks of the numerous animals and insects which swarm in this climate. If sold for a good price in such a season, to persons inhabiting other districts where the crops may have failed, the expenses of transport would form a serious item of deduction from the general profit."[14] [14] _The Cape and its Colonists_, p. 114.