The soil is wonderfully prolific but under-cultivated, and the cost of transport is enormous. Here is a statement which will no doubt in a few years be looked back upon with wonder by the author herself, and read with self-gratulatory retrospective compassion by settlers in Natal under the railway regime: ‘The country’ (between Maritzburg and Durban) ‘is beautiful; but except for a scattered homestead here and there, not a sign of a human dwelling is there on its green and fertile slopes. All along the road, shrill bugle-blasts warned the trailing ox-wagons, with their naked “forelooper,” at their head, to creep aside out of the way of the open brake in which we travelled. I counted one hundred and twenty wagons that day on fifty miles of road. Now, if one considers that each of these wagons is drawn by a span of thirty or forty oxen, one has some faint idea of how such a method of transport must use up the material of the country. Something like ten thousand oxen toil over this one road summer and winter; and what wonder is it not only that merchandise costs more to fetch up from Durban to Maritzburg than it does to bring out from England, but that beef is dear and bad? As transport pays better than farming, we hear on all sides of farms thrown out of cultivation; and in the neighbourhood of Maritzburg it is esteemed a favour to let you have either milk or butter at exorbitant prices and of most inferior quality. When one looks round at these countless acres of splendid grazing-land, making a sort of natural park on either hand, it seems like a bad dream to know that we have constantly to use preserved milk and potted meat, as being cheaper and easier to procure than fresh.’ Durban is a picturesque town, but the sand and the dust are overpowering. Fine timber abounds; the different kinds of wood having the queerest of names. Three of the hardest and handsomest native woods are called respectively stink-wood, breeze-wood, and sneeze-wood. In Durban too, magnificent flowers are everywhere in the utmost profusion; at the fête of ‘The First Sod’ the spot was beautifully decorated with plants and blossoms which would have cost a large sum in England; but these were cheaper than the nails and string used in their arrangement. This fête of ‘The First Sod’ afforded a favourable opportunity for seeing all classes of the population, colonists, Kaffirs, and coolies, for they all flocked into Durban; and Lady Barker says a shrewd thing in reference to the populace in general: ‘It was the most orderly and respectable crowd which could possibly be seen. In fact, such a crowd would be an impossibility in England or any higher civilised country. There were no dodging vagrants, no slatternly women, no squalid, starving babies. _In fact, our civilisation has not yet mounted to effervescence, so we have no dregs._’