The time has gone so quickly down here, as there has been so much going on, and every one has been so kind. We have had about twice as many invitations as we could accept.
Now we are packing up to return to Kimberley, and as they have had some good rains up there, I hope we shall find it a little cooled down. If only we could take some of this lovely greenery with us! You have no idea how grateful you ought to be in England that you can always find a green field if you go to look for it, instead of perpetual greyness and brownness and glare.
Soon after we get back P. will have to start off on circuit in the colony, and I am hoping to go part of the way with him, and then to start off on an expedition to visit some friends up country in Natal; they are fifty miles from a railway. I am looking forward to this tremendously. And then soon after it will be time for me to make tracks for home, as I have now nearly reached the venerable age of twenty-three, and am therefore eligible for beginning my training in an adult hospital. And though this sort of life is very jolly for a time, I should not like it for always; it is not so satisfying as useful work.
I am quite sad at saying good-bye to all my friends. I believe one makes real friends more easily out here than one does in England. It must be something in the air.
X
Greytown, Natal,
April 1893.
After my last letter to you we journeyed back, over the seven hundred odd miles to Kimberley, and found life up there a little flat after the gay time we had been having at the Cape; but I had some good tennis and riding, and then we had to prepare for the circuit.
At each place that the judge visits he has to do a little entertaining, so he has to take a cook and a butler with him; and as some of the places where courts are held are quite villages, he has to take a certain amount of groceries along too—and, of course, wine.