In many respects Johannesburg, the “golden city,” is the most interesting place I have ever seen. In 1886 it was nothing but a collection of miserable shanties. To-day “Joburg,” as it is commonly called, is a city of a quarter of a million people, with asphalted streets, imposing office buildings, one of the best street-railway systems that I know, the finest hotel south of the Equator, and one of the most beautiful country clubs in the world. It is a city of contrasts, however, for you can stand under the _porte-cochère_ of the palatial Carlton Hotel and hear the click of roulette balls, the raucous scrape of fiddles, and the shouts of drunken miners issuing from a row of gambling-hells, dance-halls, and gin palaces still housed in one-story buildings of corrugated iron; a beplumed and bepainted Zulu will pull you in a 'rickshaw, over pavements as smooth and clean as those of Fifth Avenue, to a theatre where you will have the privilege of paying Metropolitan Opera House prices to witness much the same sort of a performance that you would find in a Bowery music-hall; in the Rand Club you can see bronzed and booted prospectors, fresh from the mining districts of Rhodesia or the Congo, leaning over the bar, cheek-by-jowl with sleek, immaculately groomed financiers from London and Berlin and New York. Johannesburg is a spendthrift city, a place of easy-come and easy-go, for the mine-workers are paid big wages, the mine-managers receive big salaries, and the mine-owners make big profits, and they all spend their money as readily as they make it. The English miner averages five dollars a day, which he spends between Saturday night and Monday morning in a drunken spree, while a native labourer will save enough in a few months to keep him in idleness and his conception of comfort for the rest of his life.