harvest. Such rains as have descended, such snows as have been falling, such cold winds as have been blowing, must discount fearfully the joys of the three happier seasons of the year. “Invitations to stoop and enter any ‘tent’ were freely tendered, and ‘peeps’ were indulged in with regard to a few. In one, a closed cauldron covered the brazier fire, and two men and a dog watched with unceasing vigilance. We tried to make friends here, but failed. There was a steamy exudation from the cauldron which filled the air with fragrance, and our curiosity overcame our prudence, but with no satisfactory result. ‘A stew,’ we suggested. ‘Yes! it was summut stewing.’ ‘Couldn’t we guess what it was?’ ‘Not soon,’ was the reply; ‘a few bones and a potato or two; perhaps a bit of something green. At such hard times they were mostly glad to get anything.’ But nothing more could be gleaned, and the two men and the dog never lost sight of the cauldron while the visitors remained. In a few cases the tents were pegged down all round, and across the top, upon a stout line, there hung a few articles fresh from the wash. The pegged cloth indicated that the female occupants were within, but ‘not at home,’ nor would they be visible until the wind had dried the garments that fluttered overhead. We tarried, and were made quite at home in another kraal, where we gleaned many interesting particulars of Gipsy life; and here we held a sort of smoking _levée_, and were honoured by the company of many distinguished residents in camp. We lay upon a bed of straw, which covered the whole of the interior, save a little space filled with the brazier, in which a fire of coke was burning; above was a hole, out of which the smoke passed. The straw had been stamped into consistency by the feet of the family; there was no odour from it, and in that particular was an improvement on the rush and straw floors in the English houses of which Erasmus made such great complaint. There was no chair, stool, or box on which to sit, and all of us reclined Eastern fashion in the posture that was most convenient. The owner of the kraal and his wife were very interesting people: the mother’s hair descended by little steps from the crown of her head, until it stuck out like a bush, in a line with the nape of her neck, a dense dead-black mass of hair. She had been a model for painters many a time, she said, before small-pox marked her; and, since, the back of her head had often been drawn to fit somebody else’s face.