Lady Anne Barnard writes amusingly of a visit she paid to this green valley from her home on the other side of the hill, to the house of Mynheer Cloete, who once had to pay one thousand dollars for a large piece of Druip[5] stone. In a cave beyond Sir Lowry's Pass this gentleman saw the mass of petrifaction, and thinking it a safe thing, he made a bet with a Boer standing near that, though no one could possibly get such a fragile mass over the pass, he would give one thousand dollars to have it at Constantia. The fragile mass, and the Boer, turned up one day at Constantia, to the disgust of Mynheer. Lady Anne took Lord Mornington, stopping at the Cape on his way to India, to lunch with this Cloete, who showed her a new blend of wine which he had himself invented. 'I was astonished,' she remarks, 'to hear a Dutchman say he did anything his father had not done before him, for when I asked him why such and such a thing was not done, he shrugged his shoulders and said 'it was not the custom.' A characteristic episode, I fancy, and one which has taken too long to change, independence of mind and imagination not being smiled upon by cautious contentment. As Governors-General did not often pass the Cape, Mynheer brought out his best and oldest port, sherry, and claret, and 'the gentlemen's prejudices got the better of their manners'; Mynheer Cloete copiously drinking foreign claret, remarking, 'My wines are valuable; and I am glad when others like them, but I do not; whoever prizes what is made at home?' A few years before Mynheer did without his after-dinner (luncheon) 'slaap' to entertain Lord Mornington and the Barnards, Monsieur Le Vaillant, turning his unappreciated French back on the town 'where only the English are loved,' wandered into the quince and myrtle-hedged vineyard of Cloete's Constantia, where his host, a Jacobin to his finger-tips, gave him a 'sopje'[6] of his best Constantia, and Le Vaillant bewailed his prejudiced Cape Town audience aloud: 'Mynheer, here in your Kaapstad, it is the English who are adored; when they arrive, everyone is eager to offer them a lodging. In less than eight days everything becomes English in the house upon which they have fixed their choice; and the master and the mistress, and even the children (with his fine laces ballet-dancing round his waving and gesticulating hands), _et même des enfants!_ soon assume their manners.' Then came the currant in this suet. 'At table, for instance, the knife never fails to discharge the office of the fork! Would you credit this, Mynheer? I have even heard some of the inhabitants say that they would rather be taken by the English than owe their safety to the French.' Mynheer, deep in his 'sopje,' grunts a Dutch grunt of uncompromising depth.