But if Sir George Grey spoke too loudly in one direction Sir George Clerk spoke very much too loudly in the other. He was probably struck by the desolate and unalluring appearance of the lands to the north of the Orange. They are not picturesque. They are not well-timbered. They are not even well-watered. If Sir George Clerk saw them in a drought, as I did, he certainly did not look upon a lovely country. But it is a country in which men may earn easy bread by pastoral and agricultural pursuits; in which with a certain amount of care,--which has to show itself mainly in irrigation,--the choicest fruits of the earth can be plenteously produced; in which the earth never refuses her increase if she be asked for it with many tears. A howling wilderness certainly it is not. But Sir George Clerk when he described the country was anxious to excuse the conduct of Great Britain in getting rid of it, while Sir George Grey was probably desirous of showing how wrong Great Britain had been on the occasion. I do not know that I ever travelled across a less attractive country than the Orange Free State, or one in which there is less to gratify the visitor who goes to see things and not to see men and women. And the men and women are far between; for over an area presumed to include 70,000 square miles, a solid block of territory about 300 miles long by 120 miles broad, there are probably not more than 30,000 white people, and half that number of coloured people. The numbers I know are computed to be greater by the officials of the Free State itself,--but no census has been taken, and with customary patriotism they are perhaps disposed to overestimate their own strength. They, however, do not give much above half an inhabitant to every square mile. It must be remembered that in the Free State the land is all occupied;--but that it is occupied at the rate I have described. I altogether deny that the Free State is a howling wilderness, but I do not recommend English autumn tourists to devote their holydays to visiting the land, unless they have become very tired indeed of their usual resorts. The farmer in the Orange Free State is generally a Dutch Boer,--but by no means always so. During my very short visit I came across various Englishmen who were holding or who had held land there,--Africanders perhaps, persons who had been born from British parents in the Gape Colony,--but altogether British as distinguished from Dutch. In the towns the shopkeepers are I think as generally English as the farmers are Dutch in the country. We hear of the Republic as an essentially Dutch country;--but I think that if a man about to live there had to choose the possession of but one of the two languages, English would be more serviceable to him of the two. In another twenty years it certainly will be so.