I hope my long yarns won’t bore you. I put down what seems new and amusing to me at the moment, but by the time it reaches you, it will seem very dull and commonplace. I hear that the Scotchman who attacked poor Aria, the crazy Hottentot, is a ‘revival lecturer’, and was ‘simply exhorting him to break his fiddle and come to Christ’ (the phrase is a clergyman’s, I beg to observe); and the saints are indignant that, after executing the pious purpose as far as the fiddle went, he was prevented by the chief constable from dragging him to the Tronk. The ‘revival’ mania has broken out rather violently in some places; the infection was brought from St. Helena, I am told. At Capetown, old Abdool Jemaalee told me that English Christians were getting more like Malays, and had begun to hold ‘Kalifahs’ at Simon’s Bay. These are festivals in which Mussulman fanatics run knives into their flesh, go into convulsions, &c, to the sound of music, like the Arab described by Houdin. Of course the poor blacks go quite demented. I intend to stay here another two or three weeks, and then to go to Worcester—stay a bit; Paarl, ditto; Stellenbosch, ditto—and go to Capetown early in March, and in April to embark for home. _January_ 15_th_.—No mail in yet. We have had beautiful weather the last three days. Captain D— has been in Capetown, and bought a horse, which he rode home seventy-five miles in a day and a half,—the beast none the worse nor tired. I am to ride him, and so shall see the country if the vile cold winds keep off. This morning I walked on the Veld, and met a young black shepherd leading his sheep and goats, and playing on a guitar composed of an old tin mug covered with a bit of sheepskin and a handle of rough wood, with pegs, and three strings of sheep-gut. I asked him to sing, and he flung himself at my feet in an attitude that would make Watts crazy with delight, and _crooned_ queer little mournful ditties. I gave him sixpence, and told him not to get drunk. He said, ‘Oh no; I will buy bread enough to make my belly stiff—I almost never had my belly stiff.’ He likewise informed me he had just been in the Tronk (prison), and on my asking why, replied: ‘Oh, for fighting, and telling lies;’ Die liebe Unschuld! (Dear innocence!)