The point is one on which it is very difficult to come to a direct and positive conclusion. The lady began by appealing to wages, rent, the price of tea and all such articles as must be imported, the price of clothes, the material of which must at least be imported, the price of butter and vegetables, the price of schooling, of medical assistance and of law, which must be regulated in accordance with the price of the articles which the schoolmaster, doctors, and lawyers consume,--and the price of washing. In all such arguments the price of washing is brought forward as a matter in which the Colonist suffers great hardships. It must be acknowledged that the washing is dear,--and bad, atrociously bad;--so bad that the coming home of one’s linen is a season for tears and wailing. Bread and meat she gave up to me. Bread might be about the same as in Europe, and meat no doubt in Pieter Maritzburg was to be had at about half the London prices. She defied me to name another article of consumption which was not cheaper at home than in the Colony. I did not care to go through the list with her, though I think that a London butler costs more than a Zulu boy. I found the matter of wages paid to native servants to be so inexplicable as to defy my enquiries. A boy,--that is a Zulu man--would run almost anywhere for a shilling with a portmanteau on his head. I often heard of 7s. a month as the amount of wages paid by a farmer,--with a diet exclusively of mealies or of Kafir corn. And yet housekeepers have told me that they paid £5 and £6 a month wages for a man, and that they considered his diet to cost them 15s. a week. In the heat of argument exceptional circumstances are often taken to prove general statements. You will be assured that the Swiss are the tallest people in Europe because a Swiss has been found seven feet high. A man will teach himself to think that he pays a shilling each for the apples he eats, because he once gave a shilling for an apple in Covent Garden. The abnormally dear Zulu servants of whom I have heard have been I think like the giant Swiss and the shilling apple. Taking it all round I feel sure that Zulu service in Natal is very much cheaper than English service in England,--that it does not cost the half. I have no doubt that it is less regular,--but then it is more good humoured, and what it lacks in comfort is made up in freedom.