It is not, however, hard to find on the Bosheuvel Hill, though it is always being destroyed in the bush fires so frequent on the hill, when in a few minutes hundreds of trees have given one sharp crackle of agony, and are charred heaps of silvery ashes. We traced it, this old warrior of a hedge which was once the only shade for the horsemen and soldiers stationed at the Redoubt. It crosses the middle of the hill. It once looked on one side on the farm of the Commander, and on the other side on the huts and kraals of the Hottentots, whose erring cattle poked their uncivilized horns through its thick greenness; and now its aged branches lap over a barbed-wire fence which runs along the farms Oosterzee and Glen Dirk, of Mr. Philip Cloete and his brother; while, on the other side, the firs and oaks hide the white walls of Bishopscourt. The silver-tree and the bitter-almond hedge are the Ancient Inhabitants, and Marinus and I felt we were friends and in league with the barbed-wire fence, and we hated the position. So we rode down the hill into the Wynberg Park, and leaving the camp on the left we crossed the glen at the bottom of Glen Dirk, and, behold, we were in a sea of vineyards, the purple bunches almost resting their ripe weight on the burning pink earth. Some old naturalist thinks that it is to the laziness of the old vine-growers that we owe the slow evolution of our wine. No tall trellised vines or standards of France and Spain and the Rhine, no rows of mulberry-trees supporting the hanging tendrils as in Italy, but low, stubby-looking little vine-sticks; and, says my authority of a hundred years ago, 'as is well known, the exhalations from the earth are so much imbibed by the leaves of the tobacco plant which grow nearest to it, that those leaves are always rejected as unfit for use, so it is natural to suppose that the fruit of the vine hanging very near to, or even resting upon, the ground, will also receive the prevailing flavour exhaling from the soil.' This was the theory of a theorist. I have the authority of a wine-maker who says that it is not only the heavy spring winds that have necessitated low vines, but that the Cape wine was, and is, essentially a sweet wine, and to procure the right amount of sugar it is important to grow the vines as near the ground as possible, that the radiation of the sun off the ground may ripen them. Later came the demand for a lighter wine, and creeping vines were introduced grown on wire, but as close to the ground as possible, otherwise the wine does not maintain itself, and becomes acid. The old Pontac vine, which is a creeper by nature, was treated in the old days, and is still treated as a creeper, by tying a long cane across the centre of the tree, so that it lies horizontally across, close to the ground; no wire is used, or the days of sweet Pontac would be over.