On arriving at Pieter Maritzburg I put up for a day or two at the Royal Hotel which I found to be comfortable enough. I had been told that the Club was a good club but that it had not accommodation for sleeping. I arrived late on Saturday evening, and on the Sunday morning I went, of course, to hear Bishop Colonso preach. Whatever might be the Bishop’s doctrine, so much at any rate was due to his fame. The most innocent and the most trusting young believer in every letter of the Old Testament would have heard nothing on that occasion to disturb a cherished conviction or to shock a devotional feeling. The church itself was all that a church ought to be, pretty, sufficiently large and comfortable. It was, perhaps, not crowded, but was by no means deserted. I had expected that either nobody would have been there, or else that it would have been filled to inconvenience,--because of the Bishop’s alleged heresies. A stranger who had never heard of Bishop Colenso would have imagined that he had entered a simple church in which the service was pleasantly performed,--all completed including the sermon within an hour and a half,--and would have had his special attention only called to the two facts that one of the clergymen wore lawn sleeves, and that the other was so singularly like Charles Dickens as to make him expect to hear the tones of that wonderful voice whenever a verse of the Bible was commenced. Pieter Maritzburg is a town covering a large area of ground but is nevertheless sufficiently built up and perfected to prevent that look of scattered failure which is so common to colonial embryo cities. I do not know that it contains anything that can be called a handsome building;--but the edifices whether public or private are neat, appropriate, and sufficient. The town is surrounded by hills, and is therefore, necessarily, pretty. The roadways of the street are good, and the shops have a look of established business. The first idea of Pieter Maritzburg on the mind of a visitor is that of success, and this idea remains with him to the last. It contains only a little more than 4,000 white inhabitants, whereas it would seem from the appearance of the place, and the breadth and length of the streets, and the size of the shops, and the number of churches of different denominations, to require more than double that number of persons to inhabit it. Observation in the streets, however, will show that the deficiency is made up by natives, who in fact do all the manual and domestic work of the place. Their number is given as 2,500; but I am disposed to think that a very large number come in from the country for their daily occupations in the town. The Zulu adherents to Pieter Maritzburg are so remarkable that I must speak separately of them in a separate chapter. The white man in the capital as in Durban is not the working man, but the master, or boss, who looks after the working man.