Behold me now, my dear, with the half part of my journey passed, spending with delight a few days on shore in Holland--yet at the furthest extremity of the African continent. This is a sweet pretty place, the houses flat-roofed, and painted white or some bright colour, and the streets prodigiously regular and crossing one another at right angles with the most surprising neatness, and in the middle of the town a fine handsome square. Along each street are planted rows of trees, vastly symmetrical, and beside them are water-courses or small canals fed from springs, which are very agreeable for their coolness. This house (belonging to a private person who, like most of the better sort here, is glad to lodge and board us English for a rix-dollar a-day apiece, so that the sight of a British vessel entering the harbour is hailed with the most extravagant demonstrations of joy), though not what we in England should count luxurious, is almost incredible in its cleanliness, all the chamber-maids and servants being blacks. These people are called Hottentots, and the Dutch _boors_, which seems not to be understood here as a term of contempt. Our windows command a charming prospect of the great mountain overlooking the town, which from its flatness is called the Table. At times one sees the clouds descend and spread themselves upon its summit, and this, Mr Fraser tells me, is called by seamen, “the devil laying his table-cloth.” Seamen are droll creatures, en’t they, Amelia? And this reminds me to say that Messieurs Fraser and Ranger, with several other gentlemen from the Orford, are lodged in the same house as ourselves.