Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/330

 main line there. It has 1,400 people, but near it is a native town with three times as many In some places along the line, the soil is so thin that the railroad dump is made of stones; there is not enough dirt for the purpose. The telegraph poles and ties are of iron, which indicates the lack of timber. The track is excellent, and the train runs rapidly. We have become so accustomed to the narrow gauge that we do not notice the difference The dining-car on this train is clean, and the meals very good. When we went in for the first meal, we were told to pay at the end of the journey; so tomorrow morning I will pay for three meals. Which is another unusual incident of railroad travel. We notice here that hotel and train employees always know our names. When we went into the dining-car for lunch to day, the waiter asked if we were Mr. and Miss Howe. Being informed that we were, the man escorted us to a table that had been reserved. We are charged seventy-two cents for lunch and dinner, and sixty cents for breakfast In Johannesburg and Kimberley, we frequently saw the native miners going to the station to take trains for their homes. Here at nearly every station we see native miners who have completed their visit home, and are going back to work In one little valley we passed through were a good many fields of kaffir corn, and in every case the workers were women and children. Possibly the men were away working in the mines The country in which we are traveling this afternoon is eleven hundred miles from Capetown, and the track is not fenced. The occasional bunches of goats and cattle—I see no sheep—seem to