handsome black man, with high straight nose, deep-set eyes, and a small mouth, smartly dressed in a white felt hat, paletot, and trousers. He is the shoemaker, and is making a pair of ‘Veldschoen’ for you, which you will delight in. They are what the rough boers and Hottentots wear, buff-hide barbarously tanned and shaped, and as soft as woollen socks. The Othello-looking shoemaker’s name is Moor, and his father told him he came of a ‘good breed’; that was all he knew. A very pleasing English farmer, who had been educated in Belgium, came and ordered a bottle of champagne, and shyly begged me to drink a glass, whereupon we talked of crops and the like; and an excellent specimen of a colonist he appeared: very gentle and unaffected, with homely good sense, and real good breeding—such a contrast to the pert airs and vulgarity of Capetown and of the people in (colonial) high places. Finding we had no carriage, he posted off and borrowed a cart of one man and harness of another, and put his and his son’s riding horses to it, to take Mrs. D— and me home. As it was still early, he took us a ‘little drive’; and oh, ye gods! what a terrific and dislocating pleasure was that! At a hard gallop, Mr. M— (with the mildest and steadiest air and with perfect safety) took us right across country. It is true there were no fences; but over bushes, ditches, lumps of rock, watercourses, we jumped, flew, and bounded, and up every hill we went racing pace. I arrived at home much bewildered, and feeling more like Bürger’s Lenore than anything else, till I saw Mr. M—’s steady, pleasant face quite undisturbed, and was informed that such was the way of driving of Cape farmers. We found the luckless Jack in such a state of furious drunkenness that he had to be dismissed on the spot, not without threats of the ‘Tronk’, and once more Kleenboy fills the office of boots. He returned in a ludicrous state of penitence and emaciation, frankly admitting that it was better to work hard and get ‘plenty grub’, than to work less and get none;—still, however, protesting against work at all. _January_ 7_th_.—For the last four days it has again been blowing a wintry hurricane. Every one says that the continuance of these winds so late into the summer (this answers to July) is unheard of, and _must_ cease soon. In Table Bay, I hear a good deal of mischief has been done to the shipping.