While walking round the city I noticed that everything looked clean and cheerful. The streams of water running in open sluits along the side of the foot-paths, the clusters of weeping willows, the rows of stately syringas, and the pretty villas nestling in clumps of the densest foliage, conveyed the impression of ease and comfort. I also visited the various public buildings, including the banks, schools, library and hospital. On my last evening in Maritzburg, spending a few hours at the Victoria club, I met Judge Phillips (subsequently promoted to a similar judicial office in Cyprus), who, when talking over the route which I intended to take, told me that after reaching the summit of the Drakensberg and visiting the falls of the Tugela, I ought to come down again into Natal through a pass named after a certain chief Umbundi, “where,” he said, “you will have, if my information be correct, to pick your way through a forest of magnificent cypress trees such as you have never before seen.” I thanked him at the time for his information, and often since have I been glad that I took the judge’s suggested route, where, as he told me I should and as will be seen later, I found one of the grandest and most novel sights in South Africa. Next day, we left Maritzburg and ascended the Town Hill. Here we noticed the terraced character of the country, for this road rising step by step, at least 1,500 feet, landed us fairly on the plateau which forms the midland districts of Natal, where the long, rolling, grassy sweeps are the principal features of the landscape. The cracks of the long whip, the shouts of the driver, the regular times to outspan and inspan, to eat and sleep, are the only events to break the monotony of a wagon journey. The power of the trusty wagon whip, with its crack so “loud and sharp,” has so bewitchingly been sung by Mr. Charles Barter, one of Natal’s oldest colonists, that I need not offer any excuse for reproducing it here. Many a time, to the tune of the “Fine old English Gentleman,” have I listened to the lay. Britannia’s three great colonies, though children of one mother, Yet each in habits as in soil, must differ from the other, And each some symbol vaunts to show—the rapture of her soil, A humble household symbol of her settlers’ honest toil. So we along the Southern Coast, let none who hear deride, Will sing our trusty wagon whip, with its lash of sea-cow hide, Will sing our trusty wagon whip, with its lash of sea-cow hide. Through many a dreary wilderness, o’er many a barren moor, From Western Cape to fair Natal first trekked the stalwart Boer, His was the white-capt wagon, his was the steady team, And he cut the lash from the reeking hide of the sea-cow by the stream. And the savage quaked when first he heard up steep Quathlamba’s side, The crack of our dreaded wagon whip, with its lash of sea-cow hide, The crack of our dreaded wagon whip, with its lash of sea-cow hide.