I have fallen in love with a Hottentot baby here. Her mother is all black, with a broad face and soft spaniel eyes, and the father is Bastaard; but the baby (a girl, nine months old), has walked out of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s pictures. I never saw so beautiful a child. She has huge eyes with the spiritual look he gives to them, and is exquisite in every way. When the Hottentot blood is handsome, it is beautiful; there is a delicacy and softness about some of the women which is very pretty, and the eyes are those of a _good_ dog. Most of them are hideous, and nearly all drink; but they are very clean and honest. Their cottages are far superior in cleanliness to anything out of England, except in picked places, like some parts of Belgium; and they wash as much as they can, with the bad water-supply, and the English outcry if they strip out of doors to bathe. Compared to French peasants, they are very clean indeed, and even the children are far more decent and cleanly in their habits than those of France. The woman who comes here to clean and scour is a model of neatness in her work and her person (quite black), but she gets helplessly drunk as soon as she has a penny to buy a glass of wine; for a penny, a half-pint tumbler of very strong and remarkably nasty wine is sold at the canteens. I have many more ‘humours’ to tell, but A— can show you all the long story I have written. I hope it does not seem very stale and _decies repetita_. All being new and curious to the eye here, one becomes long-winded about mere trifles. One small thing more. The first few shillings that a coloured woman has to spend on her cottage go in—what do you think?—A grand toilet table of worked muslin over pink, all set out with little ‘_objets_’—such as they are: if there is nothing else, there is that here, as at Capetown, and all along to Simon’s Bay. Now, what is the use or comfort of a _duchesse_ to a Hottentot family? I shall never see those toilets again without thinking of Hottentots—what a baroque association of ideas! I intend, in a day or two, to go over to ‘Gnadenthal’, the Moravian missionary station, founded in 1736—the ‘blühende Gemeinde von Hottentoten’. How little did I think to see it, when we smiled at the phrase in old Mr. Steinkopf’s sermon years ago in London! The _missionarized_ Hottentots are not, as it is said, thought well of—being even tipsier than the rest; but I may see a full-blood one, and even a true Bosjesman, which is worth a couple of hours’ drive; and the place is said to be beautiful.