It was not until March 15th of the next year that an election took place for the return of two members to represent Kimberley in the Cape parliament. There were three candidates for the two seats. Mr. J. B. Robinson, Mr. George Bottomley, my former colleague, and myself. The excitement was most intense. The unlimited expenditure of money by the one, and the pertinacious sectarian adherents of the other, proved a formidable opposition, but the all-round support given the “red, white and blue” enabled me a second time to become the senior member for Kimberley. This election took place when the share mania was at its height, when money was very plentiful, and no ordinance being in existence forbidding brass bands, carriages, flags, rosettes, champagne and other little luxuries indulged in at such a time, the extravagant expenditure bore favorable (?) contrast with an English election in the “good old days.” As may well be imagined in a rich digging community some sharp practice occurred, but this was nothing in comparison with that which took place when the seat, which I afterward vacated, was filled up, for then the grave gave up her dead, the Capetown breakwater its convicts, and the natives “polled early and often” for the successful candidate! The assembly was in session when Mr. J. B. Robinson and myself arrived in Capetown. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXIII. NATAL AGAIN.—COOLIE IMMIGRATION.—BISHOP COLENSO.—LAING’S NEK.—INGOGO.—MAJUBA.—INTERESTING INTERVIEW WITH GENERALS JOUBERT AND SMIT.—GRAVE-YARD AT MOUNT PROSPECT.—LADY FLORENCE DIXIE.—FIRST SESSION IN CAPE HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY. The first time I took my seat in the Cape house of assembly on April 5th, 1881, I listened to a debate on a motion introduced by the leader of the Dutch party, which confirmed me in the intention that I had previously formed of paying Natal a visit at the end of the session. This debate was the first, I remember, which touched the question of Dutch feeling _versus_ English, and was in reality the expression of a sense of gratitude by the Dutch party in the colony to the Gladstone ministry, for entering into negotiations with their brethren in the Transvaal after the defeat at Majuba, rather than allowing irritation at that defeat to prolong the war. The debate led to the house agreeing to an amendment proposed by one of the members for Capetown, to the effect: “That this house desires to express its satisfaction at the cessation of hostilities in the Transvaal, and its earnest hope that all differences may be satisfactorily adjusted and a permanent peace established.” Whilst listening to the various speakers, I became more than ever anxious to visit the scenes of the war just closed, and study on the spot the battlefields where in one campaign we had suffered three complete and disastrous defeats.