Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/365

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
  • ing cattle, and guard the camp, and every afternoon

he will sleep in the wagon. Ox teams travel very slowly, and the captain will walk most of the way, and hunt as he goes along. A negro servant accompanies him as cook, and will remain with him at the new station. His nearest white neighbors will be sixty miles away, and he does not expect to receive mail more than once in three months. . . . The train is not crowded, for a wonder, and we were given a double compartment thrown into one. Our traveling acquaintances, Mrs. Meek and her daughter Bettie, are still with us, and they have equally good accommodations. The South-African railway men take good care of you when it is possible. . . . The Bishop arrived at the Falls this morning, and baptized the photographer's baby. A young curate came with him, and sat on the veranda and drank five highballs in quick succession. But the incident, like women smoking cigarettes in public, attracted no comment here. The Bishop is a genial man, and was soon surrounded by the women. The women dearly love an ordinary preacher, but to talk to a Bishop is an event in a church-worker's life she never forgets. . . . During the dry season, full-grown cattle may be bought in parts of South Africa at $10 a head. . . . When I went into the hotel dining-room for breakfast this morning, the head waiter informed me in a whisper that a few fresh eggs had just been received from the hotel farm, and advised me to order soft-boiled eggs. This head waiter was born in the West Indies, and some of the men under him are Hindus, some of them negroes, and some of them Portuguese. . . . This