However, with all these drawbacks, my friends on the farm, who were colonists of eight years standing, did their best to keep up the old customs; their two daughters and one son--all born in England--with myself, and the old people, comprised our little family party. Plum-pudding, mince pies, venison, and fowls were served up in the old style, with good English bottled ale, and sundry fruits afterwards. We managed to pass away Christmas Day with many pledges of good luck and success to all absent friends in glasses of some real old whisky which I had in my waggon. Two Zulu girls attended, with a bunch of long ostrich feathers each, to keep off the flies during meals, otherwise flies as well as food would have passed into the mouth. But the day was not to terminate as brightly as it commenced. Soon after four p.m. dense clouds were rising over the lofty Drakensberg mountains in heavy massive folds, rising one after the other in quick succession, spreading out, expanding over the clear sky above, enveloping the mountain tops, blending together earth and sky, a grand and beautiful sight, with the quick flashes of lightning and the distant rumble of the thunder. We watched with intense interest and admiration its rapid approach until we were warned by the hurricane that preceded it that the house was the safest place. Having made everything fast without, we waited its arrival. Those who have never witnessed a tropical thunderstorm can have but a faint idea of its violence, and in no place in Africa is it more so than in Natal. They are renowned for their rapid appearance and destructive effects. [Fourteen soldiers were struck in one room in Natal, some men and two officers on parade another time; whole spans of oxen are often struck, the lightning running along the trek-chain. A woman woke up one morning, and found that her husband had been struck dead by her side without her knowing it.] At half-past five it was at its height; the lightning was incessant and thunder continuous; the rain falling not in drops but in sheets, flooding everything. Shortly after six it was passing away to the east, the rumbling of the thunder growing fainter, until a calm succeeded, and the sun shone again in all its brightness, and the evening passed away as serenely and calm as if there were no such things as storms, the only evidence left being broken branches of trees, and every hollow full of water. However, this did not prevent our finishing up our Christmas amusements. I arranged to remain here until after the New Year, and prepare for my long journey to regions unknown. A driver and two boys had to be looked up.