There has been a great 'Barnard' cult of late, and the people who have wondered at the romantic and witty correspondence of Lady Anne and the Secretary of State for War, Lord Melville, have perhaps gained some geographical knowledge of the Cape Peninsula one hundred years ago. I adore Anne for her sense of humour; Marinus adores her for her faithfulness to Barnard, whom for various reasons I have depicted to him as a dullish and obliging man. [Illustration: THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE FALSE BAY, WITH CAPE HANGCLIP] Behind this overgrown hill at the top of the Newlands Avenue lies 'Paradise,' where Anne Barnard lived during the summer, and which she called her Trianon! So Mecca-wards we rode, with the gigantic grey wall of Table Mountain towering before us. We turned our horses round to face the Flats! We saw the great plains before us, once so bare that you could have seen a Hottentot crawling among the sandhills miles away; the Bosheuvel Hill, or 'Hen and Chickens,' standing out to the right, with its crown of silver-trees shivering and shining in the sun. To the east lay False Bay--thousands and thousands of emeralds set in cream; to the left, the dull, low, crouching Tygerberg Hills, full of propriety, sleek and smooth. Below us lay the Bishopscourt woods--the old Company's 'Forest lands' hiding the river and the squirrels and the black babies of Little Paradise, or Protea, with the branches of their enormous oak-trees--_chapeauz bas_ to Wilhelm Adrian Van der Stel. Anne Barnard wrote other letters than those to Lord Melville; she wrote in long charming letters to her sisters at home a description of the pretty little place called 'Paradise,' halfway up the hill, which Lord Macartney wished her to have; 'how she could not drive up the hill, but had to alight,' and walk, and thought the way to Paradise the proverbial path, hard and steep, and thought less and less of His Excellency's offer the steeper the path became. She writes--all out of breath: 'On turning round, a sequestered low road appeared, over which oaks met in cordial embrace--the path which, suddenly turning, presented to us an old farmhouse, charming in no point of architecture, but charming from the mountain which reared itself three thousand feet perpendicular above its head, with such a variety of spiral and gothic forms, wooded and picturesque, as to be a complete contrast to the hill which we had ascended or the plains over which we gazed. Before the house, _which was raised a few steps from the court_, there was a row of orange-trees. A garden, well stocked with fruit-trees, was behind the house, through which ran a hasty stream of water descending from the mountain; on the left a grove of fir-trees, whose long stems, agitated by the slightest breeze of wind, knocked their heads together like angry bullocks in a most ludicrous manner.' 'Anne! What do you say to this?'