I went on the last evening of Ramadan to the Mosque, having heard there was a grand ‘function’; but there were only little boys lying about on the floor, some on their stomachs, some on their backs, higgledy-piggledy (if it be not profane to apply the phrase to young Islam), all shouting their prayers _à tue tête_. Priests, men, women, and English crowded in and out in the exterior division. The English behaved _à l’Anglaise_—pushed each other, laughed, sneered, and made a disgusting display of themselves. I asked a stately priest, in a red turban, to explain the affair to me, and in a few minutes found myself supplied by one Mollah with a chair, and by another with a cup of tea—was, in short, in the midst of a Malay _soirée_. They spoke English very little, but made up for it by their usual good breeding and intelligence. On Monday, I am going to see the school which the priest keeps at his house, and to ‘honour his house by my presence’. The delight they show at any friendly interest taken in them is wonderful. Of course, I am supposed to be poisoned. A clergyman’s widow here gravely asserts that her husband went mad _three years_ after drinking a cup of coffee handed to him by a Malay!—and in consequence of drinking it! It is exactly like the mediæval feeling about the Jews. I saw that it was quite a _demonstration_ that I drank up the tea unhesitatingly. Considering that the Malays drank it themselves, my courage deserves less admiration. But it was a quaint sensation to sit in a Mosque, behaving as if at an evening party, in a little circle of poor Moslim priests. I am going to have a photograph of my cart done. I was to have gone to the place to-day, but when Choslullah (whom I sent for to complete the picture) found out what I wanted, he implored me to put it off till Monday, that he might be better dressed, and was so unhappy at the notion of being immortalized in an old jacket, that I agreed to the delay. Such a handsome fellow may be allowed a little vanity. The colony is torn with dissensions as to Sunday trains. Some of the Dutch clergy are even more absurd than our own on that point. A certain Van der Lingen, at Stellenbosch, calls Europe ‘one vast Sodom’, and so forth. There is altogether a nice kettle of religious hatred brewing here. The English Bishop of Capetown appoints all the English clergy, and is absolute monarch of all he surveys; and he and his clergy are carrying matters with a high hand. The Bishop’s chaplain told Mrs. J— that she could not hope for salvation in the Dutch Church, since her clergy were not ordained by any bishop, and therefore they could only administer the sacrament ‘_unto damnation_’. All the physicians in a body, English as well as Dutch, have withdrawn from the Dispensary, because it was used as a means of pressure to draw the coloured people from the Dutch to the English Church.