May we be a breakfast for hippopotami, if there is a possibility of pleasing George Nicholson, junior, Esq.! Here is a catalogue of calamities! How he baffles the unfortunate settler at every turn with some fresh and inevitable disaster! When grass abounds, it is poisonous, and, when wholesome, there is none of it! The rust and the locust conspire to destroy the wheat: when it escapes both, it must be sold for next to nothing, because it is not worth while building barns to store it. And if a Cape farmer _were_ extravagant enough to build a granary, insects and animals would empty it for him! Insects, animals, and reptiles certainly are the curse of the country--certain descriptions of them, at least. Snakes are very abundant, and nearly all deadly in their bite. In the fertile district of Zwellendam they abound, and frequently occasion severe loss by biting the sheep. Amongst the beasts of prey, lions are getting thinned by the guns of Boërs, settlers, and English officers; the jackals and hyenas are cowardly creatures, and fly from man, but play the mischief with the flocks. The rhinoceros is an ugly customer when provoked, but far less so than he would be were his sight better, and his difficulty in turning his stiff carcass less. The lumbering hippopotamus abounds in most of the rivers, and is shot from the banks by huntsmen hidden amongst the bushes; he is sometimes also taken in pitfalls, with a sharp stake at the bottom, which impales any unfortunate animal chancing to fall in. His teeth are more valuable than elephant ivory, and his flesh--especially the fat, which, when salted, eats like bacon--is greatly esteemed by both colonists and natives. The plains are in some places infested by colonies of small animals, rather larger than the squirrel, and obnoxious to the horseman, "who form a kind of warren in the softer and more sandy portions of the plain, which break in with the horse, and bury him up to his shoulders in the dust and rubbish, amongst which the rider is pretty sure of finding himself on his back." But if dangerous beasts and troublesome vermin are too plentiful in the colony, this annoyance is compensated by an extraordinary abundance of useful and profitable animals. Numerous varieties of the stag and antelope overrun the plains. Mr Nicholson, whom we suspect of a more decided predilection for the sportsman's double-barrel than for the crook and tar-barrel of the sheep-farmer, speaks in the highest terms of field-sports at the Cape, although, faithful to his system of flying off from a subject almost as soon as he touches upon it, he gives few details, hinting diffidence in approaching that subject after Harris's famous book. The little he does say impresses us with the idea of a glorious supply of venison and other choice meats. We read of twenty thousand antelopes in sight at one time; of a column of spring-bucks (a variety of the same family) fifteen miles in length, and so closely packed, that nine fell