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 I had come to the place on the mail cart, and on my arrival was very anxious to know what my travelling companion had done in the way of horse-buying. All my comfort for the next six weeks, and perhaps more than my comfort, depended on the manner in which he had executed his commission. It seemed now as though the rainy season had begun in very truth, for the waters for which everybody had been praying since I had landed in South Africa came down as though they would never cease to pour. On the day after our arrival I had got up to see the departure of the mail cart for Pretoria, and a more melancholy attempt at a public vehicle I had never beheld. Prophecies were rife that the horses would not be able to travel and that the miseries to be surmounted by the passengers before they reached their destination would be almost unendurable. When I saw the equipage I felt that the school of friends who had warned me against a journey to Pretoria in the mail carts had been right. I was extremely happy, therefore, when all the quidnuncs about the place, the butcher who had been travelling about the Colony in search of cattle for the last dozen years, the hotel-keeper who was himself in want of horses to take him over the same road, the commissariat employés, and all the loafers about the place, congratulated me on the team of which I was now the joint proprietor. There was a cart and four horses,—one of which however was a wicked kicker,—and complete harness, with a locker full of provisions to eke out the slender food to be found on the road,—all of which had cost £220. And there was a coloured driver, one George, whom everybody