"Pass up the baby!" is the first order which I hear given, and that astonishing baby is "passed up" accordingly. I use the word "astonishing" advisedly, for never was an infant so bundled about uncomplainingly. He is just as often upside down as not; he is generally handed from one quartermaster to the other by the gathers of his little blue flannel frock; seas break over his cradle on deck, but nothing disturbs him. He grins and sleeps and pulls at his bottle through everything, and grows fatter and browner and more impudent every day. On this occasion, when--after rivaling Léotard's most daring feats on the trapeze in my scramble up the side of a vessel which was lurching away from me--I at last reached the deck, I found the ship's carpenter nursing the baby, who had seized the poor man's beard firmly with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other was attempting to pick out one of his merry blue eyes. "Avast there!" cried the long-suffering sailor, and gladly relinquished the mischievous bundle to me. Up with the anchor, and off we go once more into the gathering darkness of what turns out to be a wet and windy night. Next day the weather had recovered its temper, and I was called upon deck directly after breakfast to see the "Gates of St. John," a really fine pass on the coast where the river Umzimvubu rushes through great granite cliffs into the sea. If the exact truth is to be told, I must confess I am a little disappointed with this coast-scenery. I have heard so much of its beauty, and as yet, though I have seen it under exceptionally favorable conditions of calm weather, which has allowed us to stand in very close to shore, I have not seen anything really fine until these "Gates" came in view. It has all been monotonous, undulating downs, here and there dotted with trees, and in some places the ravines were filled with what we used to call in New Zealand _bush_--i.e., miscellaneous greenery. Here and there a bold cliff or tumbled pile of red rock makes a landmark for the passing ships, but otherwise the uniformity is great indeed. The ordinary weather along this coast is something frightful, and the great reputation of our little Florence is built on the method in which she rides dry and safe as a duck among these stormy waters. Now that we are close to "fair Natal," the country opens out and improves in beauty. There are still the same sloping, rolling downs, but higher downs rise behind them, and again beyond are blue and purpling hills. Here and there, too, are clusters of fat, dumpy haystacks, which in reality are no haystacks at all, but Kafir kraals. Just before we pass the cliff and river which marks where No-Man's Land ends and Natal begins these little locations are more frequently to be observed, though what their inhabitants subsist on is a marvel to me, for we are only a mile or so from shore, and all the seeing power of all the field-glasses on board fails to discern a solitary animal.