of the bar! The legal profession is peculiarly well represented in the Colony; but I am inclined to agree with the gentleman who thought that “The Bar” in Natal was the bar across the mouth of the river. I was carried over it in safety and was driven up to the club. There is a railway from the port to the town, but its hours of running did not exactly suit the mails, to which I was permitted to attach myself. This railway is the beginning of a system which will soon be extended to Pieter Maritzburg, the capital, which is already opened some few miles northward into the sugar district, and which is being made along the coast through the sugar growing country of Victoria to its chief town, Verulam. There is extant an ambitious scheme for carrying on the line from Pieter Maritzburg to Ladismith, a town on the direct route to the Transvaal, and from thence across the mountains to Harrismith in the Orange Free State, with an extension from Ladismith to the coal district of Newcastle in the extreme north of the Colony. But the money for these larger purposes has not yet been raised, and I may perhaps be justified in saying that I doubt their speedy accomplishment. The lines to the capital and to Verulam will no doubt be open in a year or two. I should perhaps explain that Ladismith and Harrismith are peculiar names given to towns in honour of Sir Harry Smith, who was at one time a popular Governor in the Cape Colony. There is a project also for extending the Verulam line to the extreme northern boundary of the Colony so as to serve the whole sugar producing district. This probably will be effected at no very distant time as sugar will become the staple produce of the coast, if not of the entire Colony. There is a belt of land lying between the hills and the sea which is peculiarly fertile and admirably adapted for the growth of sugar, on which very large sums of money have been already expended. It is often sad to look back upon the beginnings of commercial enterprises which ultimately lead to the fortunes not perhaps of individuals but of countries. Along this rich strip of coast-land large sums of money have been wasted, no doubt to the ruin of persons of whom, as they are ruined, the world will hear nothing. But their enterprise has led to the success of others of whom the world will hear. Coffee was grown here, and capital was expended on growing it upon a large scale. But Natal as a coffee-growing country has failed. As far as I could learn the seasons have not been sufficiently sure and settled for the growth of coffee. And now, already, in the new Colony, on which white men had hardly trodden half a century ago, there are wastes of deserted coffee bushes,--as there came to be in Jamaica after the emancipation of the slaves,--telling piteous tales of lost money and of broken hopes. The idea of growing coffee in Natal seems now to be almost abandoned.