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 CHAPTER VIII.

WESTERN PROVINCE, THE PAARL, CERES, AND WORCESTER.

My last little subsidiary tours in South Africa were made from Capetown to the country immediately across the Hottentot mountains after my return from Oudtshoorn and the Cango Caves. It had then become nearly midsummer and I made up my mind that it would be very hot. I prepared myself to keep watch and ward against musquitoes and comforted myself by thinking how cool it would be on my return journey, in the Bay of Biscay for instance on the first of January. I had heard, or perhaps had fancied, that the South African musquito would be very venomous and also ubiquitous. I may as well say here as elsewhere that I found him to be but a poor creature as compared with other musquitoes,—the musquito of the United States for instance. The South African December, which had now come, tallies with June on the other side of the line;—and in June the musquito of Washington is as a roaring lion.

On this expedition I stopped first at The Paarl, which is not across the Hottentot mountains but in the district south of the mountains to which the Dutch were at first inclined to confine themselves when they regarded the apparently