Our friend was engaged in ostrich-farming, and many of these queer-looking bipeds, with their long necks and floating feathers, the beauty of which is certainly wasted on their own backs, were wandering around the house. It had been an addition to our stock of information to learn in the Cape Colony that ostrich feathers were as much the product of regulated human labour as wool, mohair, or silk. We had always supposed ostrich feathers to be procured by hunters, and had in mind stories of their tactics in the chase of the fleet-footed bird. We learned that Cape farmers buy and sell ostriches as they do sheep, and fence their flock in, stable them, and grow crops for them. The eggs are not yet considered as belonging to the Cape dairy, and are not sent to market with bread and cheese. They are too precious for consumption, and too valuable even to be left for hatching to the rude methods of nature. The act of laying has not yet been dispensed with, but as soon as the eggs have been laid the nest is discarded, the parents are "locked out," and the mechanical certainties of the incubator are substituted for parental instinct and affection. We were glad to learn, for the sake of our cherished traditions, that this farming was only of comparatively recent date, a domesticated ostrich being fifteen or twenty years ago unknown. There are now 150,000 of these domesticated birds in the Cape Colony, giving employment to not less than 8,000,000 dollars capital. Our host informed us that the rearing of ostriches was an extremely difficult operation, as the bird itself, although devouring everything that comes in its way, from a steel fork to a lemon, is very delicate, and liable to injury in all sorts of ways. They are housed at night in circular kraals, surrounded by a low rush fence, the ostrich, despite his fleetness and strength of legs, being unable to mount or jump over any obstacle, and turned out during the day into the veldt in charge of a herd.