taking refuge in the deep kloofs, bush-covered ravines, and thick-wooded recesses of the hills, were enabled to hold out still against us. The only breathing-time that the Kafirs had for nearly three months was for the first three weeks of April, during which time Seyolo, a Gaika chief, with nearly twelve hundred men, took the opportunity of rising, and joined Sandilli's forces. The general commanding (General Thesiger) was forced to suspend hostilities at this juncture, as the time for which the volunteers and burghers under his command had enrolled had expired; and they had to be dismissed to their homes and men to relieve them obtained. On the 29th of April offensive operations were resumed. It would make too long a story to recount in detail the operations directed by General Thesiger during the remainder of April, and during May and June. Suffice it to say that the operations were conducted with a vigour and an energy generally unknown in the old Kafirs' wars. The enemy, owing to the care with which his haunts were watched, had been brought to great straits for food and ammunition, and the Kafirs were also suffering from the cold. There was almost continued fighting for the first ten days of May, during which the Kafirs lost heavily, and it began to be evident that resistance must soon cease. The operations during the remainder of May dwindled down to a succession of small combats between the troops and parties of half-starved and desperate men, who would not give themselves up, but who only fought when they could neither hide nor escape. This was not at all the sort of warfare their chiefs and the old warriors of their tribes, who had fought in previous Kafir wars, had led them to expect. They had intended to rise suddenly, take the English unawares, sweep off plenty of cattle and sack farmhouses galore, and away to the mountains with their booty. From their vantage point they had intended, as in previous wars, to make raids on the surrounding country in one direction, while the troops toiled wearily after them in another. Then, when they had eaten up their stolen cattle and had had enough of excitement and of bush-life, the chiefs would open negotiations, which would be accepted by a government sick of the war, and a peace would be speedily patched up. But this war all had been very different; and now the officers of Government, instead of agreeing to the terms offered by the Kafirs, demanded immediate submission to their terms. On the 29th of May an important event occurred. Sandilli, the great chief of the fighting Gaikas, the drunken and treacherous old savage who had brought so much misery upon his own people and the colonists of the frontier, was killed by a stray shot; and his body-guard were so hard pressed that they could not carry off his body, but had only time to throw a few leaves over it. No operations of any importance took place from this date, and on the 29th June an amnesty to all who would lay down arms was proclaimed, and the war was virtually at an end. The losses of the Kafirs have by far exceeded those of any of the former Kafir wars. Of the Gaikas all the most important chiefs have been killed-Sandilli and several of his sons, Dukwana, Seyolo, and many others. Tini Macomo, Edmund Sandilli (Sandilli's chief son), Gongubella, chief of the Tambookies, are prisoners. Of the Galekas, Kreli, the prime mover of the war, is a fugitive, hunted about from place to place with a handful of followers. Kiva, Sigeav, and many other Galeka chiefs and counsellors are dead. The prospect is now hopeful. For many years alarms of Kafir risings, technically known as "scares," have done much injury to the trade and industry of the frontier. These periodical scares will not occur when confidence is fully restored, and the native question of the Cape Colony fairly faced and judiciously settled. Our faults in dealing with the Kafir tribes of the Cape frontier have been innumerable. We will state only the most important one. We have allowed the chiefs to retain (and counting from the last Kafir war we may almost say regain) so much influence and authority over the tribes, that the natives have not realised that they are first the Queen's subjects, and then their chief's, but they have given all their loyalty and obedience to their chief, and to him only. There is much yet to be done before the native races are elements of strength and riches, instead of weakness and poverty, to the colony, but already the right course to bring about this desirable change has been entered into by the present ministry. It is hoped that there will never, if an able native policy is observed, be another native war in the Cape Colony; but South Africa is still disturbed, and the wave of disturbance which has been sweeping the huge area from the Limpopo to the Orange River and to the Kei, since the Transvaal Boers were beaten back from Secocu's stronghold two years and a half ago, has not yet subsided. We have a dense Kafir population in Natal whose politics are not clearly defined, and whose actions, if the war fever got amongst them, it would be difficult to foresee. There are between the Transkei and Natal several hundred thousand Pondos who are only slowly learning that the British government objects to the riff-raff of the Natal Kafirs finding a refuge in their land. It is, however, on the eastern and north-eastern borders of Natal where lies the power which we are now face to face with. The Zulu nation has long been looked up to by the other Kafir tribes as the most aristocratic and warlike of them, and it is undoubtedly the most formidable of our possible enemies. The organization of the nation is essentially military. The Zulu king, Cetywayo, has divided his warriors into regiments according to their ages, and can put, it is thought (and there appears no reason to think the number much overstated), thirty-five or forty thousand warriors into the field. His young men have long been anxious to blood their assegais, and were waiting with impatience for their king's order to pour into the Transvaal, when, luckily for its white inhabitants, this country was proclaimed British territory. Since the annexation the Dutch Zulu border disputes have become Anglo Zulu, and in all human probability there will be war before they are decided. Peaceful men want to settle the question by arbitration, but the Zulus do not; they are anxious for excitement and to see how we fight. One pitched battle, one defeat, will probably be enough to bring half the Zulu clans over to our side, happy for a chance of escape from the cruel and bloodthirsty tyranny of their king. The Zulu power will break up, and another great hindrance to the civilisation of South Africa be swept away. The future of South Africa is an intensely interesting subject. At the rate events are marching we may hope before many years to see a South African Dominion reaching from the Cunene River on the west to the Zambesi on the east coast, in which Kafir scares and Kafir wars are things of the past; whose railway and telegraph system is completed; whose general prosperity has swept away the petty provincial jealousies-alas! now too visible; whose wealth will be pouring by many channels down to the ports of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Port Natal, Delagoa Bay, and Quillemane. The railway systems of the Cape Colony, of Natal, and the Transvaal will have joined, and South Africa, become connected by three lines of telegraph with Europe-the first vid St. Helena, Ascension, and the West Coast; the second by Natal, Delagoa, and Zanzibar; and the third by Pretoria to the Great Lakes, to Egypt, along the route Colonel Gordon is now working. LETTERS FROM MAURITIUS. BY LADY BARKER. BEAU BASSIN, August 5th. AM certain that people in England do not understand how cold the winter months are in Mauritius. Indoors it is quite cool during the day up here, and the evenings and nights are exceedingly cold. With nearly all the clumsy wooden shutters shut at night, two blankets are not at all too much, and I would give a good deal to have a fire-place in the drawing-room. It is difficult for new-comers, with the insolence of English health still about them, to understand how and why, in such a lovely climate, with no perceptible reason, there should be so many cases of fever. There is no malaria, or fog, or marsh, or swamp, to be detected anywhere, except in Port Louis, and the reins of sanitary govern III. ment seem held in a very tight hand indeed. Constant planting of gum-trees (which the hurricanes, even baby ones, tear up immediately), such draining and general "fettling-up," as is always going on! And yet a sanitary authority informed me sadly the other day, "This is an unusually healthy season, but there were over a thousand deaths from fever in May." I was amazed, but since then I have been studying the daily reports of the fever cases, and can see it must be only too true. One of my greatest pleasures here is my afternoon walk, and I still keep up my English habits of exercise. A few evenings ago we hurried to some rising ground about a mile off to "see Bourbon." Perhaps you do not understand what an atmospheric achievement that is. Bourbon is an island a hundred miles off, and can only be seen two or three times in a year. But it would have been worth going any distance, or waiting any length of time, to stand, as I stood that balmy evening, and look over the green sloping foreground which fell gradually away at my feet for a stretch of five miles or so down to the seashore, where the white girdle of reef foam only divided one brilliant water-blue from the other. My eyes could not linger, however, on the fair fields close at hand, for they could be seen every day and every hour. Apparently only ten miles off, the great Cildas range of Bourbon, with the lofty Piton de Neige, ten thousand feet high, cuts the wonderful sky as sharp and clear as our own hills close by. The outline is beautiful; but anything must needs be beautiful against such a background of western sky, glorious with crimson and amber, purple and green, with palest blue between. It is a sight to gaze at in reverent silence, for speech would jar. A few days ago we paid a charming visit to some friends who live on a large sugar estate in the north of the island. The country is very flat there, and just now, before the coupe or sugar crop, one drives over excellent roads between high waving green walls of canes. They are in full blossom at this season, and it is their prettiest moment, for the graceful white plumes, looking exactly like pampas grass to the ignorant eye, make a pleasant mesmeric rustle to the ear as they wave and bend to the slender swaying green leaves beneath. But the stones! It is a marvel how there can be any successful cultivation at all, where the stones and the soil appear to bear much the same inverted relation to each other as Falstaff's bread and sack; yet nobody seems to find them in the way. Where a fence is needed, then indeed the stones are piled up in symmetrical order, but generally the cane-field is edged with a neat border of the coarse grass used by the natives for thatching their huts. By the way," Paul and Virginia" are the great disappointment of the place. Their tomb is close to the railway, and consists of only a few loosely tumbled-together bricks, beneath which the most careful examinations have failed to discover a vestige of human remains. Nor do the localities described in the book, though sufficiently accurate in detail, fit in with each other at all. There is no doubt that the St. Géran was wrecked, but she could not have gone to pieces in the spot where Bernardin de St. Pierre lays the scene of the disaster, nor could the bodies possibly have been carried across the hills, through the dense forests of those days, in the time men- ! tioned, for the breadth of the island lies between the two places. But, after all, such geographical details don't matter, do they? and no trifling inaccuracies can ever mar the pathos and beauty of the sweet old tropical idyl, whose scene is laid one hundred and thirty years ago. We passed in the railway the dusty and unromantic spot where the dilapidated tomb still is shown to strangers. It is close to the station where you alight for the beautiful Pamplemousse gardens, but the "Baie du Tombeau " is several miles to the left. I used to feel much greater interest in Grand Baie (all the "baies" are on the tiniest imaginable scale), because one had always heard that it was there the force under General Abercrombie, which finally captured the little island, landed in 1810. This is a common mistake, as a glance at the shoal water and barrier reefs beyond Grand Baie will show. No large ship could possibly get in there. The fleet really anchored between an odd-shaped rock called Coin de Mire, and the extreme northern point of the mainland, called Cap Malheureux. The troops were landed in boats through a narrow passage in the reefs to the east of the promontory, and they could not have got ashore at all if they had not chanced to capture one of the best Creole pilots of that day, whose evil star had led him out fishing early in the morning. He was patriotic enough to resist for some time, but a little moral "suasion," and the click of a pistol trigger, convinced him that he had better live to enjoy the promised pension, than go overboard to feed the sharks. So the end of it was, that by sunrise that fine morning the fishermen saw red coats and blue jackets swarming through the dense forest by which all these waving fields of sugar-cane I am looking at to-day were then covered. The island was not well garrisoned, and, taken by surprise in this fashion, could only make. the best possible terms for itself, and the treaty was signed at a farm-house a very short way on the road to Port Louis. As we drive swiftly along the level seashore, it is beautiful to see the clear outlines of the distant hills against the tender tints of the morning sky, for our tournée must be ended and over long before eight o'clock. I wonder how the ponies manage to keep their feet, for although the ground is level enough, the sand is firmly bound together by a liane which creeps closely on the ground, and is I precisely like a net-work of strong ropes. tried to walk over it, and stumbled at every step; but we met with no misadventure. The whole island is apparently merely the top of a volcano, or series of volcanoes, which project above the water not more than one thousand eight hundred feet at the highest point. You can see the distinct circle of jagged tooth-like hills, with here and there a tremendous rent in their sides where the lava has torn its burning way through and flowed down to form the foundation of these fertile plains. The steep sides of the hills are as straight as a wall towards the top and utterly inaccessible, not affording foothold to a goat nor earth enough to grow a blade of grass. When you see the whole panorama the effect is exactly that of a magnificent and ambitious range of mountains, of which only the points are sticking up above the surface. The rest, you feel, is down below, and has yet to grow, like a child's tooth. But it is all exceedingly pretty, and the hills are quite high enough for the area of the island. As the carriagewheels turn swiftly and silently over the grassy drives between the thick groves of the filao-trees, it reminds me exactly of spring drives through glades of larches in a Staffordshire wood, except that every opening showed a stretch of opaline water, with the white reef-girdle beyond. As for the air, it was fresh to keenness, and when on our return the moon rose, we were fain to huddle ourselves up in every wrap we possessed. August 12th. Since I last wrote I have been to see the great annual festival of the year, the races, on their last day, when the entire native population of the island pours in through Port Louis, to the Champ de Mars. They can only come for the pleasure of seeing each other, for the vast stream of people begins to move off the course directly the races begin, at noon. I chanced to be dining out the evening before this monster meeting took place, and, to my mind, nothing that I saw on the race-course next day was half so wonderful as the high-road some ten miles from Port Louis at midnight. It was literally covered with a throng of Indians streaming down in the one direction. Whole families were journeying swiftly and steadily along; everybody carried a bundle, and nearly everybody carried a baby. The poor little mites were fast asleep in the most astounding positions seated astride on their mother's hips, who could only spare a finger or so to keep them in their places, for she probably had a bundle on her head, another child or two clinging to her skirts, and all her kitchen apparatus dangling about her. The men sang weird choruses to keep themselves awake, and usually held up their umbrellas in the moonlight, to my pony's extreme terror and discomfiture. As I drove through a little village, which in the daytime is as gay as a kaleidoscope, and as noisy as the monkey and parrot houses at the Zoo rolled into one, the verandahs of the hovels which form its one street were crowded with sleeping or resting travellers. Here and there a cute Chinaman always a Chinaman-had opened a booth for refreshment, and his extempore stall was surrounded by hungry customers, and so was his fire, crackling pleasantly in the open air close by. Next day I noticed how such stalls had been made really beautiful by palm branches and boughs, with bunches of gay flowers stuck between. The Indian's eve and taste for colour, though somewhat florid, is very correct, and no costly bower or recess at an English royal ball could have been more lovely in its way than these flowerwreathed shanties. The bougainvilleas are in great luxuriance just now, and so is the gay flamboyant; every cottage and hedge is covered with splendid lianes or creepers, so the decorator has not far to seek for his materials. It is worth while, for once, taking the long and dusty drive down to town to catch the first glimpse of the Champ de Mars on the great "Race Saturday." Somebody said it was like a field of poppies, but the general effect is far too white for that. More like a field of ox-eyed daisies, I thought it, with poppies here and there. In a mass and at a distance, you lose sight of the brown and black faces and hands, or they continue to blend themselves with the rising downs which surround the race-course, and all you see is a vast concourse-fifty thousand people-in snowy robes, with dashes of scarlet and orange here and there. But white is the prevailing colour, and I can only say the draperies (for they are innocent of all tailoring) are a credit to the dhobies, or washerwomen, as well as to the artistic feelings of the wearer, who winds half-a-dozen yards of muslin or calico about his lithe upright figure in folds which might have been suggested by an artist. The stream of people had begun to turn their faces homewards by the time I arrived on the Champ de Mars, but still the crowd was tremendous, and in the distance I could see merry-go-rounds and all the adjuncts of a fair, whirling merrily. Nothing could be |