On the way to Fort Beaufort I passed by Fort Brown,--a desolate barrack which was heretofore employed for the protection of the frontier when Grahamstown was the frontier city. I arrived there by a fine pass, excellently well engineered, through the mountains, called the Queen’s Road,--very picturesque from the shape of the hills, though desolate from the absence of trees. But at Fort Brown the beauty was gone and nothing but the desolation remained. The Fort stands just off the road, on a plain, and would hold perhaps 40 or 50 men. I walked up to it and found one lonely woman who told me that she was the wife of a policeman stationed at some distant place. It had become the fate of her life to live here in solitude, and a more lonely creature I never saw. She was clean and pleasant and talked well;--but she declared that unless she was soon liberated from Fort Brown she must go mad. She was eloquent in favour of hard work, declaring that there was nothing else which could give a real charm to life;--but perhaps she had been roused to that feeling by knowing that there was not a job to be done upon the earth to which in her present circumstances she could turn her hand. Optat arare caballus. She told me of a son who was employed in one of the distant provinces, and bade me find him if I could and tell him of his mother. “Tell him to think of me here all alone,” she said. I tried to execute my commission but failed to find the man. I had intended sleeping at Fort Beaufort and on going from thence up the Catsberg Mountain. But I was prevented by the coming of a gentleman, a Wesleyan minister, who was very anxious that I should see the Kafir school at Healdtown over which he presided. From first to last through my tour I was subject to the privileges and inconveniences of being known as a man who was going to write a book. I never said as much to any one in South Africa,--or even admitted it when interrogated. I could not deny that I possibly might do so, but I always protested that my examiner had no right to assume the fact. All this, however, was quite vain as coming from one who had written so much about other Colonies, and was known to be so inveterate a scribbler as myself. Then the argument, though never expressed in plain words, would take, in suggested ideas, the following form. “Here you are in South Africa, and you are going to write about us. If so I,--or we, or my or our Institution, have an absolute claim to a certain portion of your attention. You have no right to pass our town by, and then to talk of the next town merely because such an arrangement will suit your individual comfort!” Then I would allege the shortness of my time. “Time indeed! Then take more time. Here am I,--or here are we, doing our very best; and we don’t intend to be passed by because you don’t allow yourself enough of time for your work.” When all this was said on behalf of some very big store, or perhaps in favour of a pretty view, or--as