Nevertheless, if one looks out upon the town, as I did, from a high window, and sees one of its frequent black thunderstorms breaking over the chimneys and waste - heaps of its gold mines, there is something wild and picturesque about it. And crossing the railway to the residential quarter comes upon some fine houses, with gardens full of bright flowers under a deep-blue sky. The view from some of the rocky hills, among which these houses are built, away over a deep valley to the far blue range of the Magaliesberg, is really beautiful. The last time I was there, in January, some of the gardens were delicious with masses of violets.

But beauty is not the thing upon

which Johannesburg prides itself. There is no denying the fact that it turns out from its mines a vast quantity of gold,-thirty million pounds a-year or more,— and this being the case, it must, I suppose, be forgiven for disfiguring the veldt. is something fascinating, too, about the mines themselves. The roar of their never-resting machinery gets on the brain, and they are dusty and squalid

There

The long rock tunnels, hundreds of feet under-ground, lit by electric light, the strings of trucks carrying ore along the tramways, the gigantic lifts, the machines which crush great masses of conglomerate rock as if they were walnuts, all give one a wonderful sense of power. It is interesting, too, to watch the cakes of grey amalgam in which the uninitiated eye can see no traces of gold, gradually giving birth to lumps of yellow sponge; and the yellow sponge thrown into pots in a furnace under the floor to emerge as liquid metal; and the liquid metal turned into solid gold bricks worth a couple of thousand pounds apiece. All very interesting, and all making one feel one would not live that life for anything in the world.

Yet those who do live it seem happy enough. They are certainly well paid. The English miner, I was told, gets on an average as nearly as possible a pound a-day-about as much as a colonel commanding a regiment; and the native labourers, who play their "pianos" and sing and dance every night in the compounds, can save enough in a few months' work to set themselves up for life as country gentle

men.

If only the white miners would be a little more careful they could save large sums of money, as some of them do; but the majority seem to be

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rather reckless. The life underground, and the heat and dust, and the prevalence of miners' phthisis, all tend to encourage the curse of the place-drink. Too many of them, I was told, return to work on Monday, after a thirty-six hours' "spree, none the better off for the high pay drawn on Saturday afternoon, or for the beer and whisky into which too much of it has been turned. They are not far-sighted in other ways either. No miner, whatever he has done at home, will touch unskilled work here. That is "Kafir's work." So they never learn their business from the bottom, and many of the natives and Chinese, who do learn it, are becoming skilled workmen, especially the Chinese. But the Chinese will soon be a thing of the past. These people, about whom so much trouble was made in England for party purposes, were evidently most prosperous and contented. mere politics.

It was all

There is some pleasant sooiety in Johannesburg, and the kindest of hospitality for a stranger, and much sport of one kind and another. One must go a long way now for good shooting, but there is some racing, and some good cricket and football and tennis. The climate is variable, very stormy and windy and dusty at times, but, as a rule, bright and sunny. An English policeman whom I met one day at a street corner, where I was waiting for a tram-car, told me with quaint precision that there were three hundred and thirty-three cloud

Go

Few places could be more unlike Johannesburg than Pretoria, thirty miles away. It was a stormy afternoon when our train steamed out of Johannesburg station. The sky was dark, and hail lay all about the town, two or three inches deep, making the grey mine-heaps look very dirty. They are almost beautiful by moonlight. The hailstones were in places, according to the next day's newspaper, "as big as a duck's egg," and had smashed plateglass freely.

A mile or two from Johannesburg there was no hail on the ground, but a very heavy thunderstorm was rolling away to the eastward over the veldt, the black clouds torn perpendicularly by vivid forks of lightning, and glowing at intervals like a furnace from the reflection of the sinking sun. These evening storms are a common feature of the Johannesburg summer. They roll off as suddenly as they come. Long before the train passed through the circle of fortcrowned hills which guard Kruger's old capital the sky was clear again, and the stars were beginning to shine.

Pretoria has often been described, but, having perhaps read the descriptions carelessly, I was surprised to find it at first sight so English a town. The shops and signs on the main street seemed almost all

ing into the Parliament buildings in the fine central square, I found English officials at work; and crossing over the square to the Supreme Court opposite, I might have seen, though I did not see, an English Chief - Justice presiding, and English barristers, without wigs, pleading in English. Driving on to the little jail where the Reform prisoners were confined in 1896, I was let in through the old gateway by an English warder, who showed the wretched cell where they lay for so long. It had been turned into a store, and was full of uniforms, clothing, boots, and other things of the kind. Almost all the warders in the jail were English. Of the men condemned to death by Kruger's Court, three or four were then sitting as members of the National Convention at Cape Town discussing the Union of South Africa.

I rode out a few miles across the plain, and saw the police doing their drill. They were a mixed corps, mostly English, some Dutch, with English officers. A finer body of men you would not easily see. The minimum height was 5 ft. 9 in., and they were mounted on excellent Australian horses, which I was told were easier to get than country breds, and seemed to take kindly to the stony kopjes. English horses would not have stood the ground, but the Australian, as we have found in Central Asia, is harder in the legs and feet. Eng

lishmen and Dutchmen alike seemed smart and contented. Certainly Pretoria did not give one the impression of a town where the English population was being oppressed by a hostile Boer Government.

Of course Pretoria was not all English. The Prime Minister, General Botha, was Dutch, as were several of the other Ministers, and Dutchmen were gradually being introduced into all branches of the administration. Possibly, as some declared, they were being introduced too fast, and with too little consideration for Englishmen whose appointments were being retrenched. But many Englishmen were convinced that General Botha and his following were acting in a loyal and statesmanlike spirit, and deserved loyal support. Certainly the simple unaffected manner and conversation of the Boer leader impressed one very favourably. I was told that he had had the courage and foresight to vote as one of a very small minority against the war in which he played so distinguished a part; and undoubtedly, in the general opinion, he stood out as the man whose moderation and force of character had made the reconciliation of the races a possible thing. If that opinion was wrong, the consensus in its favour among the English leaders was very remarkable.

The Union of South Africa, for which General Botha worked so well, is now an accomplished fact, and the British Crown has shown in a striking manner its

recognition of the importance of that fact. It cannot be doubted that the South African people will have understood the significance of the Duke of Connaught's visit, and seen in it the clearest proof of the sympathy with which the Union movement was regarded in Great Britain.

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The contrast between the Pretoria of ten years ago and the Pretoria I saw was such as to make one think deeply on the mutability of human affairs. Kruger's house was still there, the low whitewashed house on the old Dutch road, with the rough white lions on the stoep, where the stubborn old President used to sit smoking and drinking his coffee. Just opposite was the little church where he used to hold forth. But the house was unoccupied; the room to the left of the doorway was full of funeral wreaths; and the crafty indomitable old man was lying in the cemetery hard by, under his black tomb, while the hated flag against which he fought so long flew over the capital where he had collected his guns and hatched his schemes of conquest. It is better so, no doubt; but as one stands by his grave, and looks at the heavy powerful face carved in white marble above it, one cannot but be touched by something of admiration for his stubborn courage, and of sympathy for the race feeling which grew stronger with him year after year from the time when he went out with his people as a boy in the Great Trek.