Two days after I read: "A concert this evening, with some comic songs. I noticed the piano was draped with the same Union Jack that covered the poor girl two days ago."
One can hardly realize what a sailing voyage of this magnitude must have been in the old days. Our modern impatience can hardly endure the thought. The announcement one evening that at dawn we should sight Table Mountain was extremely pleasant. The arrival had the never-fading charm. "I see papa!" sang out little M. "How are the children?" hailed papa from the quay. "All well!" And we land on utterly new ground to begin a new experience. A short train journey, turning the flank of Table Mountain, brings us to our new home at Rosebank, where I find a pair of shapely Cape ponies harnessed to the Victoria awaiting us at the station.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF OUR GARDEN AT ROSEBANK]
"Strange land; strange birds with startling cries; strange flowers; strange scents! I received a bouquet of welcome on my arrival composed of grass-green flowers with brilliant rose-coloured leaves. Where am I? _Where_ are the points of the compass?
"I was watching the sun travelling to his setting this evening, and, forgetting I was perforce facing North to watch him, he seemed to be sloping down towards the East! And lo! when he was gone, the crescent moon on the wrong side of the sunset and turned the wrong way. And a cold south wind bringing melancholy messages from the Antarctic. 'There has been a storm in the south,' some one said, and the words struck drearily on my mind's ear.
"My Bible, so full of imagery taken from the aspects of Nature, is turned inside out.
Arise (depart), north wind; and come, O south wind; blow through my garden, and let the aromatical spices thereof flow (Canticles iv. 16).
At Christmas I no more desire a rose Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth.-- _Love's Labour's Lost._
"Here roses load the Christmas air with sweetness, and May ushers in the snow upon the mountains.
When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.--_Sonnet._
"Yesterday a furnace-blast swooped down upon us from the great deserts to the north, and I feel I shall never be myself while I continue to see my shadow at noonday projected southward. But enough of grumbling for the present.