To see it aright the visitor should travel by it from Ceres towards the Railway. We passed it in both directions and I was never more struck by the different aspect which the same scenery may bear if your face be turned one way or the other. The beauty here consists of the colour of the rocks rather than of the shape of the hills. There is a world of grey stone around you as you ascend from the valley which becomes almost awful as you look at it high above your head and then low beneath your feet. As you begin the ascent from Ceres, near the road but just out of sight of it, there is a small cataract where the Breede runs deep through a narrow channel,--so narrow that a girl can jump from rock to rock. Some years since a girl was about to jump it when her lover, giving her a hand to help her, pulled her in. She never lived to become his bride but was drowned there in the deep black waters of the narrow Breede. Ceres is one of those village-towns by which this part of the Colony is populated, and lies in a Rasselas happy valley,--a basin so surrounded by hills as to shew no easy way out. The real Rasselas valley, however, was, we suppose, very narrow, whereas this valley is ten miles long by six broad, and has a mail cart road running through it. It lies on the direct route from Capetown to Fraserburg, and thence, if you choose to go that way, to the Diamond Fields and the Orange Free State. Nevertheless the place looks as though it were, or at least should be, delightfully excluded from all the world beyond. Here again the houses stand separate among trees, and the river flowing through it makes everything green. I was told that Ceres had been lately smitten with too great a love of speculation, had traded beyond her means, and lost much of her capital. It was probably the reaction from this condition of things which produced the peculiarly sleepy appearance which I observed around me. A billiard room had been lately built which seemed just then to monopolize the energy of the place. The hotel was clean and pleasant,--and would have been perfect but for a crowd of joyous travellers who were going down to see somebody married two or three hundred miles off. On our arrival we were somewhat angry with the very civil and considerate landlady who refused to give us all the accommodation we wanted because she expected twelve other travellers. I did not believe in the twelve travellers, and muttered something as to trying the other house even though she devoted to the use of me and my friend a bedroom which she declared was as a rule kept for ladies. We of course demanded two rooms,--but as to that she was stern. When a party of eleven did in truth come I not only forgave her, but felt remorse at having occupied the best chamber. She was a delightful old lady, a German, troubled much in her mind at the time by the fact that a countryman of hers had come to her house with six or seven dozen