Chapter XXVIII: Only a Dream (1)

Of all those who lived through the fever, poor Alick Corfield's case had been the most desperate while it lasted. Mr. Gryce, his fellow-sufferer, had been up and about his usual work, extracting Aryan roots and impaling Lepidoptera for a month and more, while Alick was still in bed among ice-bags and Condy's Fluid, and as bad as at the beginning--indeed, worse, having had a relapse which nothing but his wiry constitution, backed by his mother's scientific nursing, could have pulled him through. Gradually the danger passed, and this time his convalescence was solid, and, though slow, uninterrupted. He began to creep about the house by the aid of sticks and arms, and he came down stairs for the first time on the day when the Harrowbys and Birketts returned home; but he remained in strict quarantine, and Steel's Corner was scrupulously avoided by the neighbors as the local lazaretto which it would be sinful to invade. By all but Leam, who went daily to ask after the invalid, and to keep the mother company for exactly half an hour by the clock.

One day when she went on her usual errand Mrs. Corfield met her at the hall-door, "Alick will be glad to see you, my dear," she called out, radiant with happiness, as the girl crossed the threshold. "We are in the drawing-room to-day, as brisk and bonny as a bird: such a treat for him, poor dear!"

"I am glad," said Leam, who held a basket of early spring flowers in her hand. "Now you are happy." Tears came into the poor mother's haggard eyes. "Happy, child! You do not know what I feel," she said with tremulous emotion. "Only a mother who has been so near to the loss of her dearest, so near to heartbreak and despair, as I have been, can know the blessed joy of the reprieve."

"How you love him!" said Leam in a half whisper. "I loved mamma like that."

"Yes, poor child! I remember," said Mrs. Corfield with compassion. She forgot that at the time she had thought the girl's love and despair, both the one and the other, exaggerated and morbid. She met her now on the platform of sympathy, and her mind saw what it brought to-day as it had seen what it had brought before, but she was not conscious of the contradiction.

"I thought I should have died too when she did. I wish I had," said Leam, looking up to the sky with dreamy love, as if she still thought to meet her mother's face in the blue depths.

"My poor dear! it was terrible for you," sighed the elder woman sympathetically. "But you must not always mourn, you know. There is a time for everything, even for forgetting, and for being happy after sorrow."

"Never a time for me to forget mamma, nor to be happy," said Leam.

"Why not?" answered Mrs. Corfield in her impatient way. "You are young, nice-looking, in tolerably good health, but you are black round your eyes to-day. You have friends: I am sure all of us, from my husband downward, think a great deal of you. And Alick has always been your friend. Why should you not be happy?"

Leam put the question by. "Yes, you have always been kind to me," she answered. "I remember when mamma died how you wanted to be kind then. But I did not understand you as I do now. And how good Alick was! How sorry I should have been if anything had happened to him now!" Her beautiful face grew tender with the thought. She did really love Alick in her girlish, sisterly way.

Mrs. Corfield looked at her. "Have you never loved any one else as you loved your poor mother?" she asked.

Leam lifted her eyes. "Never," she answered simply. "I have liked a few people since, but love as I loved mamma? No!"

"Leam, I am going to ask you a straightforward question, and you must give me a straightforward answer: Which do you like best, my boy or Edgar Harrowby?" Mrs. Corfield asked this suddenly, as if she wanted to surprise the girl's secret thought rather than have a deliberate answer.

"I like them differently," began Leam without affectation. "Alick is so unlike Major Harrowby in every way. And then I have known him so long--since I was a mere child. I feel that I can say what I like to him: I always did. But Major Harrowby is a stranger, and I am--I don't know: it is all different. I cannot say what I mean." She hesitated, stopped, grew pale, glanced aside and looked disturbed; then putting on her old air of cold pride, she drew herself a few paces away and said, "Why do you ask me such a question, Mrs. Corfield? You should not."

Mrs. Corfield sighed. If Edgar was undecided between his personal desires and conventional fitness, she was undecided between her longing to see Alick happy and her dislike to his being happy in any way but the one she should design for him. He had raved a good deal during his illness, and had said many mad things connected with Leam--always Leam; and since his convalescence his mother had seen clearly enough how his heart was toward her. His pleasure when he heard that she had been there, his childish delight in anything that she had brought for him, the feverishness with which he waited to hear her step, her voice from a distance, always demanding that the doors should be left open so that he might hear her,--all betrayed to his mother as plainly as confession would have done the real thoughts of his heart, and cast a trouble into her own whence she saw no present satisfactory issue. Though she was fond of Leam now, and grateful to her for her faithful visits during Alick's illness, yet, just as Edgar doubted of her fitness as a wife for the master of the Hill, so did she doubt of her fitness as a daughter-in-law for Steel's Corner. As a friend she was pleasant enough, with her quaint ways and pretty face; but as one of the Corfield family, bound to them for ever--what then would she be? But again, if Alick really loved her, she would not like to see him disappointed. So, what between her dislike to the marriage should it ever be, and her fear for Alick's unhappiness should he ask and be refused, the poor mother was in a state of confused feelings and contradictory wishes which did not agree with a nature like hers, given to mathematical certainties and averse to loose ends and frayed edges anywhere. As nothing more was to be got out of Leam at this moment, and as Mrs. Corfield knew that Alick would be impatient, they went into the drawing-room together, Leam carrying her basket of spring flowers for her old friend.

It was pitiful to see the poor fellow. Thin, gaunt, plainer than ever, if also ennobled by that almost saintly dignity which is given by illness, the first impression made on Leam was one of acute physical repulsion: the second only gave room to compassion. Fortunately, that little shudder of hers was unnoticed, and Alick saw only the beloved face, more beautiful to him than anything out of heaven, with its grave intensity of look that seemed so full of thought and feeling, turned to him--saw only those glorious eyes fixed once more straight on his--felt only the small hand which seemed to give him new life to touch lying clasped in his own, weak, wasted, whitened, like a dead hand for color against the warm olive of her skin. It was almost worth while to have been separated so long to have this joy of meeting; and he thought his pain and danger not too dearly bought by this exquisite pleasure of knowing that she had pitied him and cared for him.

He raised himself from his pillows as he took her small, warm, fibrous hand, and his pallid face brightened into a tearful smile. "Ah!" he said, drawing a deep breath, "I am so glad to see you again!"

"I am glad to see you too," said Leam with a certain sudden embarrassment, she did not know why, but it came from something that she saw in his eyes and could not explain even to herself.

"Are you?" He pressed her hand, which he still held. "It does me good to hear you say so," he replied.

"I have brought you some flowers," then said Leam, a little coldly, drawing away her hand, which she hated to have either held or pressed.

He took them with a pleased smile. "Our pretty wild-flowers!" he said gratefully, burying his face in them, so cool and fresh and fragrant as they were. "They are like the giver," he added after a pause, "only not so sweet."

"Do you remember when I persisted to you there were no wild-flowers in England?" asked Leam, wishing that Alick would not pay her compliments.

"Do I remember? That was the first time I saw you," cried Alick. "Of what else have I thought ever since?"

"You like wild-flowers and celandine, do you not?" asked poor Leam, desperately disturbed. "I found them in the wood as I came here."

"And picked them for me?--up in the corner there by Barton's? I know. And you went up the lane for them--for me?" he repeated.

"Yes," said Leam.

"For me?" he asked again.

"Why, yes: for whom else could it have been?" answered Leam in the tone of grave rebuke he knew so well--the tone which always expressed, "You are stupid."

Alick's lip quivered. "You are so good," he said.

"Am I?" asked Leam seriously.

Then something passed over her face, a kind of gray shadow of remembrance, and she dropped her eyes. Was she good? and could he think so?

A silence fell between them, and each knew of what the other was thinking; then Leam said suddenly, to break that terrible silence, which she felt was more betraying than even speech would have been, "I am sorry you have been so ill. How dreadfully ill you have been!"

"Yes," he said, "I have been bad enough, I believe, but by God's grace I have been spared."

"It would have been more grace not to have let you get ill in the beginning," said Leam gravely.

Alick looked distressed. Should he never Christianize this pagan? "Don't say that, dear," he remonstrated. "We must not call in question His will."

"Things are things," said Leam with her quiet positiveness. "If they are bad, they are bad, whoever sends them."

"No. God cannot send us evil," cried Alick.

"Then He does not send us disease or sorrow," answered Leam. "If He does, it is silly to say they are good, or that He is kind to make us ill and wretched. I cannot tell stories. And all you people do."

"Leam, you pain me so much when you talk like this. It is bad, dear--impious and unchristian. Ah! can I never bring you to the true way?" he cried with real pain.

"You cannot make me tell stories or talk nonsense because you say it is religious," replied Leam, impervious and unconvinced. "I like better to tell the truth and call things by their right names."

"And you cannot feel that we are little children walking in the dark and that we must accept by faith?" said Alick.

She shook her head, then answered with a certain tone of triumph in her voice, "Well, yes, it is the dark: so let it be the dark, and do not pretend you understand when you do not. Do not say God made you ill in one breath, and in another that He is kind. It is silly."

"Now, my boy, don't excite yourself," said Mrs. Corfield, bustling into the room and noting how the thin cheek had flushed and how bright and feverish the hollow eyes of her invalid were looking. "You know the doctor says you are not to be excited or tired. It is the worst thing in the world for you."

"I am neither, mother: don't alarm yourself," he answered; "but I must have a little talk with Leam. I have not seen her for so long. How long is it, mother?"

"Well, my dear, you have been ill for over ten weeks," she said as she went to the window with a sudden gasp.

"Ten weeks gone out of my life!" he replied.

"We have all been sorry," said Leam a little vaguely.

His eyes grew moist. He was weak and easily moved. "Were you very sorry?" he asked.

"Very," she answered, for her quite warmly.

"Then you did not want me to die?" He said this with a yearning look, raising himself again on his elbow to meet her eyes more straightly.

"Want you to die?" she repeated in astonishment. "Why should I want you to die? I want you to get well and live."

He took her hand again. "God bless you!" he said, and turned his face to the pillow to conceal that he was weeping.

Again that gray look of remembrance, passed over her face. She knew now what he had meant. "No," she said slowly, "I do not want you to die. You are good, and would harm no one."

After this visit Leam saw Alick whenever she called at the house, which, however, was not so often as heretofore, and week by week became still more seldom. Something was growing up in her heart against him that made his presence a discomfort. It was not fear nor moral dislike, but it was a personal distaste that threatened to become unconquerable. She hated to be with him; hated to see his face looking at her with such yearning tenderness as abashed her somehow and made her lower her eyes; hated his endeavors to convert her to an orthodox acceptance of mysteries she could not understand and of explanations she could not believe; hated his sadness, hated his joy: she only wished that he would go away and leave her alone. What did he mean? What did he want? He was changing from the blushing, awkward, subservient dog of his early youth, and from the still subservient if also more argumentative pastor of these later days alike, and she did not like the new Alick who was gradually creeping into the place of the old.

When Mrs. Corfield spoke of taking him to the sea for change of air, her heart bounded as if a weight had been suddenly removed, and she said, "Yes, he ought to go," so warmly that the mother was surprised, wondering if she cared so much for him that the idea of his getting good elated her beyond herself and made her forget her usual reserve. She instinctively contrived not to see him alone now when she went to Steel's Corner during his tedious convalescence, for the poor fellow mended but slowly, if surely. Either she had only a short time to stay, and so stood for a moment, making serious talk impossible, or she took little Fina with her, or maybe she entangled Mrs. Corfield in the conversation so that she should not leave them alone, the vague fear and distaste possessing her making her strangely _rusée_ and on the alert. But one day she was caught. It had to come, and it was only a question of time. She knew that, as we know when our doom is upon us.

Leam had not intended to go in to-day, but Alick, who was in the garden rejoicing in the warmth and freshness of this tender April noontide, came to meet her at the second gate, and asked her to come and sit with him on the garden-seat, there where the budding lilacs began to show their bloom, and there where they sat on that fatal day when she had hidden the little phial in her hair and bade him tell her of flowers till she tired.

She hesitated, and was on the point of refusing, when he took her by the upper part of her arm as if to hold her. "Do," he pleaded. "I want to say something to you."

"I have no time to stay," she answered, shrinking from his touch.

"Yes, yes, time enough for all I have to say," he returned. "I beg you to come with me to-day, Leam--I beg it; and I do not often ask a favor of you."

There was something in his manner that seemed to compel Leam to consent in spite of herself. True, he besought, but also he seemed almost to command; and if he did not command, then his earnestness was so strong that she was forced to yield to it. Trembling, but with her proud little head held straight--wondering what was coming, and vaguely conscious that whatever it was it would be pain--Leam let him take her to the garden-seat where the budding lilacs spoke of springtime freshness and summer beauty. Alick was trembling too, but from excitement, not from fear. He had made up his mind now, and when he had once resolved he was not wavering. He would ask her to share his life, accept his love, and he would thus take on himself half the burden of her sin. This was how he felt it. If he married her, knowing all that he knew, he would make himself the partner of her crime, because he would accept her past like her present--like her future; and thus he would be equally guilty with her before God. But he would trust to prayer and the Supreme Mercy to save her and him. He would carry no merits of devotion as his own claim, but he would have freed her of half her guilt, and he would be content to bear his own portion of punishment for this unfathomable gain. It was the man's love, but also the soul's passionate promise of sacrifice and redemption, that gave him boldness to plead, power to ask for a grace to which, had this deep stain of sin never tainted her, he would not have dared to aspire. But, as it was, his love was her greater safety, and what he gained in earthly joy he would lose in spiritual peace, while her partial forgiveness would be bought by the loss of his security of salvation. Not that she understood all this or ever should, but it gave him courage.

"When you first saw me, Leam, after my illness you said that you wanted me to live," he began in a low voice, husky with emotion. "Do you mean this?"

"Yes," she said, looking straight before her.

"Live for you?" he asked.

"For us all," she answered.

"No, not for us all--for you," he returned with insistence.

"That would be silly," said Leam quietly. "I am not the only person in the world: you have your mother."

"For my mother, perhaps; but for the world, nothing. You are the world to me," said Alick. "Give me your love, and I care for nothing else. Tell me you will be my wife, and I can live then--live as nothing else can make me. Leam, can you love me, dear? I have loved you from the first moment I saw you. Will you be my wife?"

"Your wife!" cried Leam with an involuntary gesture of repulsion. "You are dreaming."

"No, no: I am in full earnest. Tell me that you love me, Leam. Oh, I believe that you do. Surely I have not deceived myself so far. Why should you have come every day--every day, as you have done--if you do not love me? Yes, you do--I know you, do. Say so, Leam, my darling, my beloved, and put me out of my misery of suspense."

"You are my good friend: I love you like a friend; but a wife--that is different," faltered Leam.

"Yes, but it will come if you try," pleaded Alick, shifting his point from confidence to entreaty. "Won't you try to love me as I love you, Leam? Won't you try to love me as a wife loves her husband?"

She turned away. "I cannot," she answered in a low voice, yet firm and distinct. It was a voice in which even the most sanguine must have recognized the accent of hopeless certainty, inevitable despair.

"Leam, it will be your salvation," cried Alick, taking her hands. He meant her spiritual salvation, not her personal safety: it was a prayer, not a threat.

"You would not force me by anything you may know?" asked Leam in the same low, firm, distinct voice. "Not even for safety, Alick."

"Which I would buy with my own," he answered--"with my eternal salvation."

"I am not worthy of such love," said Leam trembling. "And oh, dear Alick, do not blame me, but I cannot return it," she added piteously.

She saw him start and heard him moan when she said this, but for a moment he was silent. He seemed half stunned as if by a heavy blow, but one that he was doing his best to bear. "Tell me so again, Leam. Let me be convinced," he then said with pathetic calmness, looking into her face. "You cannot love me?--never? never?"

"Never," she said, her voice breaking.

Alick covered his face in his hands, and she saw the tears trickle slowly through his fingers. He made no com-plaint, no protestation, only covered up his face and prayed, weeping, recognizing his fate.

She was sorry and heart-struck. She felt cruel, selfish, ungrateful, but for all that she could not yield nor say that she would marry him, trying to love him. Confused images of something dearer than this as the love of her life passed before her mind. They were images without recognizable form or tangible substance, but they were the true love, and this was not like them. No, she could not yield. Sorry as she might be for him, and was, she could not promise to marry him.

"Yes," he then said after a pause, lifting up his wan face, tear-stained and disordered, but making a sad attempt to smile--"yes, dear Leam, I was, as you say, dreaming. We shall always be friends, though--brother and sister, as we have been--to the end of our lives, shall we not?"

"Yes," was her answer, tears in her own eyes and a kind of wonder at her hardness running through her repugnance.

"Thank you, darling, thank you! If you want a friend, and I can be that friend and can serve you, you will come to me, will you not? You may want me some day, and you know that I shall not fail you. Don't you know that, my royal Leam?"

"I am sure of you," she half whispered, shuddering. To be in his power and to have rejected him! It all seemed very terrible and confused to Leam, to whom things complex and entangled were abhorrent.

"And now forget all this. I was only dreaming, dear. Why, no, of course you could not have married me--never could--never, never! I know that well enough now. You see I have been ill," nervously plucking at his hands, "and have had strange fancies, and I do not know myself or anything about me quite yet. But forget it all. It was only a sick fancy, and I thought what did not exist"

"I am sorry to have hurt you even in fancy," said Leam; giving a sigh of relief. "I do not like to see you unhappy, Alick. You are so-good to me."

"And to the end of my life I shall be what I have been," he said earnestly. "You can trust me, Leam."

"I am sorry I have hurt you," she said again, bending forward and looking up into his face. "But it was only a dream, was it not?" pleadingly.

He smiled pitifully, "Yes, dear, only a dream," he answered, turning away his head. After a while he took her hand and looked into her face, "And now it has passed," he said, calm that she should not be sorry.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

LOVE'S SEPULCHRE.

Build for my love a costly sepulchre;
Not underneath cathedral arches dim,
Where the sad soul may wake to comfort her
The stately music of a funeral hymn;

Nor on some wind-swept hill, whose wavering grass
Sways to the summer breezes blowing free,
While the great cedars, rustling as they pass,
Murmur a cadence of the mournful sea;

Not in the arched depths of the solemn woods,
Within the flickering shadows cool and deep,
Where the still wing of silence ever broods,
And woos the weary soul to dreamless sleep.

But build it in the temple of my heart,
And from the sacred and mysterious shrine
A flame of deathless memory shall start,
Tended by Sorrow and by Love divine.

All sweetest recollections of past joy
Shall haunt that shrine, to make it heavenly fair:
All memories of bliss without alloy
Shall cluster in undying beauty there.

There quiet peace shall hold resistless sway:
Softer than snow the holy hush shall be.
Till even Sorrow gently glide away,
And Love divine alone keep watch with me.

KATE HILLARD.

LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA.

BY LADY BARKER.

ALGOA BAY, October 23, 1875.

Two days ago we steamed out of Table Bay on just such a gray, drizzling afternoon as that on which we entered it. But the weather cleared directly we got out to sea, and since then it has carried us along as though we had been on a pleasant summer cruise. All yesterday we were coasting along the low downs which edge the dangerous sea-board for miles upon miles. From the deck of the Edinburgh Castle the effect is monotonous enough, although just now everything is brightly green; and, with their long ribbon fringe of white breaker-foam glinting in the spring sunshine, the stretches of undulating hillocks looked their best. This part of the coast is well lighted, and it was always a matter of felicitation at night when, every eighty miles or so, the guiding rays of a lighthouse shone out in the soft gloom of the starlight night. One of these lonely towers stands more than eight hundred feet above the sea-level, and warns ships off the terrible Agulhas Bank.

We have dropped our anchor this fresh bright morning a mile or so from the shore on which Port Elizabeth stands. Algoa Bay is not much of a shelter, and it is always a chance whether a sudden south-easter may not come tearing down upon the shipping, necessitating a sudden tripping of anchors and running out to sea to avoid the fate which is staring us warningly in the face in the shape of the gaunt ribs or rusty cylinders of sundry cast-away vessels. To-day the weather is on its good behavior; the south-easter rests on its

aëry nest
As still as a brooding dove;

and sun and sea are doing their best to show off the queer little straggling town creeping up the low sandy hills that lie before us. I am assured that Port Elizabeth is a flourishing mercantile place. From the deck of our ship I can't at all perceive that it is flourishing, or doing anything except basking in the pleasant sunshine. But when I go on shore an hour or two later I am shown a store which takes away my breath, and before whose miscellaneous contents the stoutest-hearted female shopper must needs _baisser son pavilion_. Everything in this vast emporium looked as neat and orderly as possible, and, though the building was twice as big as the largest co-operative store in London, there was no hurry or confusion. Thimbles and ploughs, eau-de-cologne and mangles, American stoves, cotton dresses of astounding patterns to suit the taste of Dutch ladies, harmoniums and flat-irons,--all stood peaceably side by side together. But these were all "unconsidered trifles" next the more serious business of the establishment, which was wool--wool in every shape and stage and bale. In this department, however, although for the sake of the dear old New Zealand days my heart warms at the sight of the huge packages, I was not supposed to take any interest; so we pass quickly out into the street again, get into a large open carriage driven by a black coachman, and make the best of our way up to a villa on the slope of the sandy hill. Once I am away from the majestic influence of that store the original feeling of Port Elizabeth being rather a dreary place comes back upon me; but we drive all about--to the Park, which may be said to be in its swaddling-clothes _as_ a park, and to the Botanic Gardens, where the culture of foreign and colonial flowers and shrubs is carried on under the chronic difficulties of too much sun and wind and too little water. Everywhere there is building going on--very modest building, it is true, with rough-and-ready masonry or timber, and roofs of zinc painted in strips of light colors, but everywhere there are signs of progress and growth. People look bored, but healthy, and it does not surprise me in the least to hear that though there are a good many inhabitants, there is not much society. A pretty little luncheon and a pleasant hour's chat in a cool, shady drawing-room, with plenty of new books and music and flowers, gave me an agreeable impression to carry back on board the ship; which, by the way, seemed strangely silent and deserted when we returned, for most of our fellow-passengers had disembarked here on their way to different parts of the interior.

As I saunter up and down the clean, smart-looking deck of what has been our pleasant floating home during these past four weeks, I suddenly perceive a short, squat pyramid on the shore, standing out oddly enough among the low-roofed houses. If it had only been red instead of gray, it might have passed for the model of the label on Bass's beer--bottles; but, even as it is, I feel convinced that there is a story connected with it: and so it proves, for this ugly, most unsentimental-looking bit of masonry was built long ago by a former governor as a record of the virtues and perfections of his dead wife, whom, among other lavish epithets of praise, he declares to have been "the most perfect of women." Anyhow, there it stands, on what was once a lonely strip of sand and sea, a memorial--if one can only believe the stone story, now nearly a hundred years old--of a great love and a great sorrow; and one can envy the one and pity the other just as much when looking at this queer, unsightly monument as when one stands on the pure marble threshold of the exquisite Taj Mahal at Agra, and reads that it too, in all its grace and beauty, was reared "in memory of an undying love."

Although the day has been warm and balmy, the evening air strikes chill and raw, and our last evening on board the dear old ship has to be spent under shelter, for it is too cold to sit on deck. With the first hours of daylight next morning we have to be up and packing, for by ten o'clock we must be on board the Florence, a small, yacht-like coasting-steamer which can go much closer into the sand-blocked harbors scooped by the action of the rivers all along the coast. It is with a very heavy heart that I, for one, say good-bye to the Edinburgh Castle, where I have passed so many happy hours and made some pleasant acquaintances. A ship is a very forcing-house of friendship, and no one who has not taken a voyage can realize how rapidly an acquaintance grows and ripens into a friend under the lonely influences of sea and sky. We have all been so happy together, everything has been so comfortable, everybody so kind, that one would indeed be cold-hearted if, when the last moment of our halcyon voyage arrived, it could bring with it anything short of a regret.

With the same chivalrous goodness and courtesy which has taken thought for the comfort of our every movement since we left Dartmouth, our captain insists on seeing us safely on board the Florence (what a toy-boat she looks after our stately ship!) and satisfying himself that we can be comfortably settled once more in our doll's house of a new cabin. Then there comes a reluctant "Good-bye" to him and all our kind care-takers of the Edinburgh Castle; and the last glimpse we catch of her--for the Florence darts out of the bay like a swallow in a hurry--is her dipping her ensign in courteous farewell to us.

In less than twenty-four hours we had reached another little port, some hundred and fifty miles or so up the coast, called East London. Here the harbor is again only an open roadstead, and hardly any vessel drawing more than three or four feet of water can get in at all near the shore, for between us and it is a bar of shifting sand, washed down, day by day, by the strong current of the river Buffalo. All the cargo has to be transferred to lighters, and a little tug steamer bustles backward and forward with messages of entreaty to those said lighters to come out and take away their loads. We had dropped our anchor by daylight, yet at ten o'clock scarcely a boat had made its appearance alongside, and every one was fuming and fretting at the delay and consequent waste of fine weather and daylight. That is to say, it was a fine bright day overhead, with sunshine and sparkle all round, but the heavy roll of the sea never ceased for a moment. From one side to the other, until her ports touched the water, backward and forward, with slow, monotonous heaving, our little vessel swayed with the swaying rollers until everybody on board felt sick and sorry. "This is comparatively a calm day," I was told: "you can't possible imagine from this what rolling really is." But I _can_ imagine quite easily, and do not at all desire a closer acquaintance with this restless Indian Ocean. Breakfast is a moment of penance: little G---- is absolutely fainting from agonies of sea-sickness, though he has borne all our South-Atlantic tossings with perfect equanimity; and it is with real joy that I hear the lifeboat is alongside, and that the kind-hearted captain of the Florence (_how_ kind sailors are!) offers to take babies, nurse and me on shore, so as to escape a long day of this agonizing rolling. In happy unconsciousness of what landing at East London, even in a lifeboat, meant when a bar had to be crossed, we were all tumbled and bundled, more or less unceremoniously, into the great, roomy boat, and were immediately taken in hand by the busy little tug. For half a mile or more we made good progress in her wake, being in a position to set at naught the threatening water-mountains which came tumbling in furious haste from seaward. It was not until we seemed close to the shore and all our troubles over that the tug was obliged to cast us off, owing to the rapidly shoaling water, and we prepared to make the best of our own way in. Bad was that best, indeed, though the peril came and went so quickly that it is but a confused impression I retain of what seemed to me a really terrible moment. One instant I hear felicitations exchanged between our captain--who sits protectingly close to me and poor, fainting little G----, who lies like death in my arms--and the captain of the lifeboat. The next moment, in spite of sudden panic and presence of danger, I could laugh to hear the latter sing out in sharpest tones of terror and dismay, "Ah, you would, would you?" coupled with rapid orders to the stout rowers and shouts to us of "Look out!" and I _do_ look out, to see on one side sand which the retreating wave has sucked dry, and in which the boat-seems trying to bury herself as though she were a mole: on the other hand there towers above us a huge green wave, white-crested and curled, which is rushing at us like a devouring monster. I glance, as I think, for the last time, at the pale nurse, on whose lap lies the baby placidly sucking his bottle. I see a couple of sailors lay hold of her and the child with one hand each, whilst with the other they cling desperately to the thwarts. A stout seafaring man flings the whole weight of his ponderous pilot-coated body upon G---- and me: I hear a roar of water, and, lo! we are washed right up alongside of the rude landing-place, still _in_ the boat indeed, but wet and frightened to the last degree. Looking back on it all, I can distinctly remember that it was not the sight of the overhanging wave which cost me my deadliest pang of sickening fright, but the glimpse I caught of the shining, cruel-looking sand, sucking us in so silently and greedily. We were all trembling so much that it seemed as impossible to stand upright on the earth as on the tossing waters, and it was with reeling, drunken-looking steps that we rolled and staggered through the heavy sand-street until we reached the shelter of an exceedingly dirty hotel. Everything in it required courage to touch, and it was with many qualms that I deposited limp little G---- on a filthy sofa. However, the mistress of the house looked clean, and so did the cups and saucers she quickly produced; and by the time we had finished a capital breakfast we were all quite in good spirits again, and so sharpened up as to be able to "mock ourselves" of our past perils and present discomforts. Outside there were strange, beautiful shrubs in flower, tame pigeons came cooing and bowing in at the door, and above all there was an enchanting freshness and balminess in the sunny air.

In about an hour "Capting Florence" (as G---- styles our new commander) calls for us and takes us out sight-seeing. First and foremost, across the river to the rapidly-growing railway lines, where a brand-new locomotive was hissing away with full steam up. Here we were met and welcomed by the energetic superintendent of this iron road, and, to my intense delight, after explaining to me what a long distance into the interior the line had to go and how fast it was getting on, considering the difficulties in the way of doing anything in South Africa, from washing a pocket-handkerchief up to laying down a railway, he proposed that we should get _on_ the engine and go as far as the line was open for anything like safe traveling. Never were such delightful five minutes as those spent in whizzing along through the park-like country and cutting fast through the heavenly air. In vain did I smell that my serge skirts were getting dreadfully singed, in vain did I see most uncertain bits of rail before me: it was all too perfectly enchanting to care for danger or disgrace, and I could have found it in my heart to echo G----'s plaintive cry for "More!" when we came to the end and had to get off. But it consoled us a little to watch the stone-breaking machine crunching up small rocks as though they had been lumps of sugar, and after looking at that we set off for the unfinished station, and could take in, even in its present skeleton state, how commodious and handsome it will all be some day. You are all so accustomed to be whisked about the civilized world when and where you choose that it is difficult to make you understand the enormous boon the first line of railway is to a new country--not only for the convenience of travelers, but for the transport of goods, the setting free of hundreds of cattle and horses and drivers--all sorely needed for other purposes--and the fast-following effects of opening up the resources of the back districts. In these regions labor is the great difficulty, and one needs to hold both patience and temper fast with both one's hands when watching either Kafir or Coolie at work. The white man cannot or will not do much with his hands out here, so the navvies are slim-looking blacks, who jabber and grunt and sigh a good deal more than they work.

It is a fortunate circumstance that the delicious air keeps us all in a chronic state of hunger, for it appears in South Africa that one is expected to eat every half hour or so. And, shamed am I to confess, we _do_ eat--and eat with a good appetite too--a delicious luncheon at the superintendent's, albeit it followed closely on the heels of our enormous breakfast at the dirty hotel. Such a pretty little bachelor's box as it was!--so cool and quiet and neat!--built somewhat after the fashion of the Pompeian houses, with a small square garden full of orange trees in the centre, and the house running round this opening in four corridors. After lunch a couple of nice, light Cape carts came to the door, and we set off to see a beautiful garden whose owner had all a true Dutchman's passion for flowers. Here was fruit as well as flowers. Pine-apples and jasmine, strawberries and honeysuckle, grew side by side with bordering orange trees, feathery bamboos and sheltering gum trees. In the midst of the garden stood a sort of double platform, up whose steep border we all climbed: from this we got a good idea of the slightly undulating land all about, waving down like solidified billows to where the deep blue waters sparkled and rolled restlessly beyond the white line of waves ever breaking on the bar. I miss animal life sadly in these parts: the dogs I see about the streets are few in number, and miserably currish specimens of their kind. "Good dogs don't answer out here," I am told: that is to say, they get a peculiar sort of distemper, or ticks bite them, or they got weak from loss of blood, or become degenerate in some way. The horses and cattle are small and poor-looking, and hard-worked, very dear to buy and very difficult to keep and to feed. I don't even see many cats, and a pet bird is a rarity. However, as we stood on the breezy platform I saw a most beautiful wild bird fly over the rose-hedge just below us. It was about as big as a crow, but with a strange iridescent plumage. When it flitted into the sunshine its back and wings shone like a rainbow, and the next moment it looked perfectly black and velvety in the shade. Now a turquoise-blue tint comes out on its spreading wings, and a slant in the sunshine turns the blue into a chrysoprase green. Nobody could tell me its name: our Dutch host spoke exactly like Hans Breitmann, and declared it was a "bid of a crow," and so we had to leave it and the platform and come down to more roses and tea. There was so much yet to be seen and to be done that we could not stay long, and, laden with magnificent bouquets of _gloire de Dijon_ roses and honeysuckle, and divers strange and lovely flowers, we drove off again in our Cape carts. I observed that instead of saying "Whoa!" or checking the horses in anyway by the reins, the driver always whistles to them--long, low whistle--and they stand quite still directly. We bumped up and down, over extraordinarily rough places, and finally slid down a steep cutting to the brink of the river Buffalo, over which we were ferried, all standing, on a big punt, or rather pontoon. A hundred yards or so of rapid driving then took us to a sort of wharf which projected into the river, where the important-looking little tug awaited us; and no sooner were we all safely on board--rather a large party by this time, for we had gone on picking up stragglers ever since we started, only three in number, from the hotel--than she sputtered and fizzed herself off up-stream. By this time it was the afternoon, and I almost despair of making you see the woodland beauty of that broad mere, fringed down to the water's edge on one side with shrubs and tangle of roses and woodbine, with ferns and every lovely green creeping thing. That was on the bank which was sheltered from the high winds: the other hillside showed the contrast, for there, though green indeed, only a few feathery tufts of pliant shrubs had survived the force of some of these south-eastern gales. We paddled steadily along in mid-stream, and from the bridge (where little G---- and I had begged "Capting Florence" to let us stand) one could see the double of each leaf and tendril and passing cloud mirrored sharp and clear in the crystalline water. The lengthening shadows from rock and fallen crag were in some places flung quite across our little boat, and so through the soft, lovely air, flooded with brightest sunshine, we made our way, up past Picnic Creek, where another stream joins the Buffalo, and makes miniature green islands and harbors at its mouth, up as far as the river was navigable for even so small a steamer as ours. Every one was sorry when it became time to turn, but there was no choice: the sun-burned, good-looking captain of the tug held up a warning hand, and round we went with a wide sweep, under the shadows, out into the sunlight, down the middle of the stream, all too soon to please us.

Before we left East London, however, there was one more great work to be glanced at, and accordingly we paid a hasty visit to the office of the superintendent of the new harbor-works, and saw plans and drawings of what will indeed be a magnificent achievement when carried out. Yard by yard, with patient under-sea sweeping, all that waste of sand brought down by the Buffalo is being cleared away; yard by yard, two massive arms of solidest masonry are stretching themselves out beyond those cruel breakers: the river is being forced into so narrow a channel that the rush of the water must needs carry the sand far out to sea in future, and scatter it in soundings where it cannot accumulate into such a barrier as that which now exists.

Lighthouses will guard this safe entrance into a tranquil anchorage, and so, at some not too far distant day, there is good hope that East London may be one of the most valuable harbors on this vast coast; and when her railway has reached even the point to which it is at present projected, nearly two hundred miles away, it will indeed be a thriving place. Even now, there is a greater air of movement and life and progress about the little seaport, what with the railway and the harbor-works, than at any other place I have yet seen; and each great undertaking is in the hands of men of first-rate ability and experience, who are as persevering as they are energetic. After looking well over these most interesting plans there was nothing left for us to do except to make a sudden raid on the hotel, pick up our shawls and bags, pay a most moderate bill of seven shillings and sixpence for breakfast for three people and luncheon for two, and the use of a room all day, piteously entreat the mistress of the inn to sell us half a bottle of milk for G----'s breakfast to-morrow--as he will not drink the preserved milk--and so back again on board the tug. The difficulty about milk and butter is the first trouble which besets a family traveling in these parts. Everywhere milk is scarce and poor, and the butter such as no charwoman would touch in England. In vain does one behold from the sea thousands of acres of what looks like undulating green pasturage, and inland the same waving green hillocks stretch as far as the eye can reach: there is never a sheep or cow to be seen, and one hears that there is no water, or that the grass is sour, or that there is a great deal of sickness about among the animals in that locality. Whatever the cause, the result is the same--namely, that one has to go down on one's knees for a cupful of milk, which is but poor, thin stuff at its best, and that Irish salt butter out of a tub is a costly delicacy.

Having secured this precious quarter of a bottle of milk, for which I was really as grateful as though it had been the Koh-i-noor, we hastened back to the wharf and got on board the little tug again. "Now for the bridge!" cry G---- and I, for has not Captain Florence promised us a splendid but safe tossing across the bar? And faithfully he and the bar and the boat keep their word, for we are in no danger, it seems, and yet we appear to leap like a race-horse across the strip of sand, receiving a staggering buffet first on one paddle-wheel and then on the other from the angry guardian breakers, which seem sworn foes of boats and passengers. Again and again are we knocked aside by huge billows, as though the poor little tug were a walnut-shell; again and again do we recover ourselves, and blunder bravely on, sometimes with but one paddle in the water, sometimes burying our bowsprit in a big green wave too high to climb, and dashing right through it as fast as if we shut our eyes and went at everything. The spray flies high over our heads, G---- and I are drenched over and over again, but we shake the sparkling water off our coats, for all the world like Newfoundland dogs, and are all right again in a moment, "Is that the very last?" asks G---- reluctantly as we take our last breaker like a five-barred gate, flying, and find ourselves safe and sound, but quivering a good deal, in what seems comparatively smooth water. Is it smooth, though? Look at the Florence and all the other vessels. Still at it, see-saw, backward and forward, roll, roll, roll! How thankful we all are to have escaped a long day of sickening, monotonous motion! But there is the getting on board to be accomplished, for the brave little tug dare not come too near to her big sister steamboat or she would roll over on her. So we signal for a boat, and quickly the largest which the Florence possesses is launched and manned--no easy task in such a sea, but accomplished in the smartest and most seamanlike fashion. The sides of the tug are low, so it is not very difficult to scramble and tumble into the boat, which is laden to the water's edge by new passengers from East London and their luggage. When, however, we have reached the rolling Florence it is no easy matter to get out of the said boat and on board. There is a ladder let down, indeed, from the Florence's side, but how are we to use it when one moment half a dozen rungs are buried deep in the sea, and the next instant ship and ladder and all have rolled right away from us? It has to be done, however, and what a tower of strength and encouragement does "Capting Florence" prove himself at this juncture! We are all to sit perfectly still: no one is to move until his name is called, and then he is to come unhesitatingly and do exactly what he is told.

"Pass up the baby!" is the first order which I hear given, and that astonishing baby is "passed up" accordingly. I use the word "astonishing" advisedly, for never was an infant so bundled about uncomplainingly. He is just as often upside down as not; he is generally handed from one quartermaster to the other by the gathers of his little blue flannel frock; seas break over his cradle on deck, but nothing disturbs him. He grins and sleeps and pulls at his bottle through everything, and grows fatter and browner and more impudent every day. On this occasion, when--after rivaling Léotard's most daring feats on the trapeze in my scramble up the side of a vessel which was lurching away from me--I at last reached the deck, I found the ship's carpenter nursing the baby, who had seized the poor man's beard firmly with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other was attempting to pick out one of his merry blue eyes. "Avast there!" cried the long-suffering sailor, and gladly relinquished the mischievous bundle to me.