Resting a night I took train to Verulam, Victoria County, my old seat of practice. This line of rail was all new to me, having been laid since I left, though it ran through sugar and coffee plantations which I knew well. On arriving at Verulam I procured a horse and rode off to visit the various estates in the neighborhood: Redcliffe, the Grange, Ottawa, Hammonds, Waterloo, Trenance, Southburn, Sunderland, and others whose names have escaped my recollection, and their hospitable owners I saw again. Many of the estates, however, I found had been taken up by Mauritians, and the vacuum pan sugar boilers, as well as the field overseers, had mostly come from that island, in fact old residents told me that in the trains running to and from D’Urban there was now almost continually a complete babel of French, English, Hindustani and Kafir. I must say that I was disappointed with the general appearance of the coast. Coffee enterprise seemed dying out fast, no planting going on, the trees suffering from an insect, the “borer,” and from the leaf disease (_Hemiteia Vastratrix_), which has played such havoc in Ceylon. The extent of land under sugar had increased, but drought, low prices, and the competition of beet-root were making the planters look serious. Another phase of affairs which struck me as assuming unmanageable proportions was the keen competition of the cheap-living Asiatic, who in the cultivation of small holdings could almost beat the European out of the field. When I saw these men, these crofters, themselves working their patches of ground, I was at once let into the secret of their success. White men in Natal, as a rule, think manual labor in the fields derogatory. The only exception to this of which I ever knew was a settlement of Germans near D’Urban. From the feeling generally abroad I can easily understand the unpalatableness of Froude’s remarks when he wrote: “Here and there a farmer makes a fortune, but generally the whites will not work because they expect the blacks to work for them. The blacks will not work because they prefer to be idle, and so no one works at all.” After all there is a considerable stratum of truth running through this statement. To return to the coolie question, Indians seem very loath to leave Natal. I find in the last Natal Blue Book that out of 33,343, comprising men of all castes landed from India since immigration began in 1860, only 2,141 have returned, the total number of Indians in the colony in 1884 being 27,276, of whom 17,241 were males and 10,035 females.