There is not much attempt to describe scenery in Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters, but just enough to show that her eye was as sensitive to landscape as to the shades of racial character and feeling. She indicates delicately yet effectively the difference between the atmosphere at the coast and that inland. ‘It is the difference between a pretty pompadour beauty and a Greek statue. Those pale opal mountains as distinct in every detail as the map on your table and so cheerful and serene; no melodramatic effects of clouds and gloom.’ But, as a rule, it is the human pageant that engrosses her, and here her sense of values is extraordinarily keen. There is no better instance than the portrait of the German basket-maker’s wife, who confided to the writer her timidity on landing in Africa. ‘I had never—she said—been out of the city of Berlin and knew nothing.’ She spoke of the natives as well-bred (_anständig_), and Lady Duff Gordon’s comment is: ‘The use of the word was characteristic. She could recognize an _Anständigkeit_ not of Berlin.’ But one might quote from every second page of these letters. Lady Duff Gordon was less than a year in South Africa; but in that time she brought more happiness to those around her than many have done in a lifetime. And her bounties live after her. A last remark may not be out of place here, although it will doubtless occur to every reader who approaches these letters with sympathy and discretion. They must be read as true letters and the spontaneous delineation of a personality, and not as a considered contribution to South African history. Freer even than Stevenson himself from ‘le romantisme des poitrinaires’, and singularly clear-sighted in all that comes under her personal observation, Lady Duff Gordon does not wholly escape the nemesis which overtakes the traveller who accepts his history from hearsay. And in South Africa, as we know, such nemesis is well-nigh unfailing. Few, however, have been the travellers, as the following pages will show, who could meet such a charge with so great evidence of candour, disinterestedness, and love of human nature in its simplest and most innocent forms. J. P. INTRODUCTORY THE following letters were written, as the reader will readily perceive, without the remotest view to publication. They convey in the most unreserved manner the fresh and vivid impressions of the moment, to the two persons with whom, of all others, the writer felt the least necessity for reserve in the expression of her thoughts, or care about the form in which those thoughts were conveyed.