Lady Barker, to whom the public is indebted for the most practically useful works on New Zealand which have been placed within the reach of the intending emigrant, having now completed a year’s residence in our South African colony, gives us, in _A Year’s Housekeeping in South Africa_ (London: Macmillan & Co.), the benefit of her recent experience in a volume equally useful and entertaining. As compared with Christchurch, the capital of the province of Canterbury, in New Zealand, Maritzburg, in ‘fair Natal,’ is a backward and sleepy place. Recent events may have the effect of developing its ambition and accelerating its speed. But here is Lady Barker’s description of its actual condition: ‘Maritzburg consists of a few straight, wide, grass-grown streets, which are only picturesque at a little distance on account of their having trees on each side. On particularly dark nights, a dozen oil-lamps, standing at long intervals apart, are lighted; but when it is even moderate starlight, these aids to finding one’s way about are prudently dispensed with. Only two buildings make the least effect. One is the Government House, standing in a nice garden, and boasting of a rather pretty porch, but otherwise reminding one, except for the sentinel on duty, of a quiet country rectory. The other is a small block comprising the public offices. A certain air of quaint interest and life is given to the otherwise desolate streets by the groups of Kaffirs, and the teams of wagons waiting for their up-country loads. Twenty bullocks drag these ponderous contrivances—bullocks so lean that one wonders how they have strength to carry their wide-spreading horns aloft; bullocks of a stupidity and obstinacy unparalleled in the natural history of horned beasts.’ These teams are called ‘spans;’ and when, on Sundays, the teams and the wagons are ‘outspanned’ on the green slopes around Maritzburg, the aspect of the place, generally dull and lifeless, becomes strikingly picturesque. The road to Maritzburg from Port Durban, at which travellers to Maritzburg land from the steamer which conveys them to Cape Town, is very tedious to travel by the government mule wagon, which bumps about in ruts, and sticks in mud after a fashion that renders the prospect of the railway now in course of construction very attractive to the expectant colonists; but it is also very beautiful. ‘Curved green hills, dotted with clusters of timber exactly like an English park, and a background of distant ranges rising in softly rounded outlines, with deep violet shadows in the clefts, and pale green lights on the slopes,’ form its principal features. Nestling amid this rich pasture-land are the kraals of a large Kaffir ‘location;’ and it is satisfactory to learn that in our South African colony at least, the native population has not been entirely sacrificed to the white man.