Land in the Orange Free State is very cheap, an evil condition of things which has been produced by the large grants of land which were made to the original claimants. The average value throughout the State may now be fixed at about 5s. an acre. It is said that in the whole State there are between six and seven thousand farms. CHAPTER XII. BLOEMFONTEIN. Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Republic, is a pleasant little town in the very centre of the country which we speak of as South Africa, about a hundred miles north of the Orange River, four hundred north of Port Elizabeth whence it draws the chief part of its supplies, and six hundred and eighty north east of Capetown. It is something above a hundred miles from Kimberley which is its nearest neighbour of any importance in point of size. It is about the same distance from Durban, the seaport of Natal, as it is from Port Elizabeth;--and again about the same distance from Pretoria the capital of the Transvaal. It may therefore be said to be a remote town offering but little temptations to its inhabitants to gad about to other markets. The smaller towns within the borders of the Republic are but villages containing at most not more than a few hundred inhabitants. I am told that Bloemfontein has three thousand; but no census has as yet been taken, and I do not know whether the number stated is intended to include or exclude the coloured population,--who as a rule do not live in Bloemfontein but at a neighbouring hamlet, devoted to the use of the natives, called Wray Hook. I found Bloemfontein a pleasant place when I was there, but one requiring much labour and trouble both in reaching and leaving. For a hundred miles on one side and a hundred on the other I saw hardly a blade of grass or a tree. It stands isolated in the plain,--without any suburb except the native location which I have named,--with as clearly defined a boundary on each side as might be a town built with a pack of cards, or one of those fortified citadels with barred gates and portcullises which we used to see in picture books. After travelling through a country ugly, dusty and treeless for many weary hours the traveller at last reaches Bloemfontein and finds himself at rest from his joltings, with his bones not quite dislocated, in the quiet little Dutch capital, wondering at the fate which has led him to a spot on the world’s surface, so far away, apparently so purposeless, and so unlike the cities which he has known.