I Have The Best
Cabin After The Stern Cabins, Which Are Occupied By The Captain And
His Wife And The
Attorney-General of Capetown, who is much liked.
The other passengers are quiet people, and few of them, and the
Captain has a high character; so I may hope for a comfortable,
though slow passage. I will let you know the day I sail, and leave
this letter to go by post. I may be looked for three weeks or so
after this letter. I am crazy to get home now; after the period
was over for which I had made up my mind, home-sickness began.
Mrs. R- has offered me a darling tiny monkey, which loves me; but I
fear A- would send me away again if I returned with her in my
pocket. Nassirah, old Abdool's pretty granddaughter, brought me a
pair of Malay shoes or clogs as a parting gift, to-day. Mr. M-,
the resident at Singapore, tells me that his secretary's wife, a
Malay lady, has made an excellent translation of the Arabian
Nights, from Arabic into Malay. Her husband is an Indian
Mussulman, who, Mr. M- said, was one of the ablest men he ever
knew. Curious!
I sat, yesterday, for an hour, in the stall of a poor German
basket-maker who had been long in Caffre-land. His wife, a
Berlinerin, was very intelligent, and her account of her life here
most entertaining, as showing the different Ansicht natural to
Germans. 'I had never', she said, 'been out of the city of Berlin,
and KNEW NOTHING.' (Compare with London cockney, or genuine
Parisian.) Thence her fear, on landing at Algoa Bay and seeing
swarms of naked black men, that she had come to a country where no
clothes were to be had; and what should she do when hers were worn
out? They had a grant of land at Fort Peddie, and she dug while
her husband made baskets of cane, and carried them hundreds of
miles for sale; sleeping and eating in Caffre huts. 'Yes, they are
good, honest people, and very well-bred (anstandig), though they go
as naked as God made them. The girls are pretty and very delicate
(fein), and they think no harm of it, the dear innocents.' If
their cattle strayed, it was always brought back; and they received
every sort of kindness. 'Yes, madam, it is shocking how people
here treat the blacks. They call quite an old man 'Boy', and speak
so scornfully, and yet the blacks have very nice manners, I assure
you.' When I looked at the poor little wizened, pale, sickly
Berliner, and fancied him a guest in a Caffre hut, it seemed an odd
picture. But he spoke as coolly of his long, lonely journeys as
possible, and seemed to think black friends quite as good as white
ones. The use of the words anstandig and fein by a woman who spoke
very good German were characteristic.
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