“You seem in fine form,” said Frank, smiling.
“Just had a salt water bath. The other fellows in my cabin had soda and brandy. I feel fresher now than they do.”
The ship was a steamer, Druid, but she was staggering along under a power of canvas and, bar accident, two more days would see them safe in Cape Town.
Fred Freeman had been very loth and sorry to leave his friends in Russia, for reasons well known to the reader. Frank, for reasons of a similar nature, had been just as anxious to get back to dear old Wales, to enjoy, so he said, six weeks’ hunting. But Chisholm had looked at him with a right merry twinkle in his blue eyes as he replied,—
“Nay, boy, nay, the next hunting you’ll do will be at the Cape. I promised your father to take you right round the world, and I told some one else that some one else wouldn’t see you again for three years at the very least. So there!”
Here is an extract from Chisholm’s diary, written three months after:—
“The Cape hills in sight at last. But I shouldn’t say at last, because our passage has been everything one could wish. Fred and Frank are both a bit low, leastways they don’t talk enough, perhaps they think. Wonder if it is their late lotus-eating life that is telling upon their constitutions, or is it merely that they’re in love. A little bit of both, perhaps. But they’ll wake up ere long without a doubt.”
Chisholm was perfectly correct in his surmises, both Fred and Frank did wake up, and as soon as the roaring of the steam from the funnel, and the rattling of the anchor chains, convinced them that the voyage was indeed at an end, they threw aside their hooks, pulled themselves together, and entered heart and soul into the excitement of shore going.
A whole week was to be spent at Cape Town, and it was the best and sweetest time of all the year they could have chosen to visit the place. In the town itself and the suburbs the gardens were gorgeous in their floral beauty, and all the wild romantic hills around were crimson and white with geraniums, and the rarest and loveliest of heaths and wild flowers. Roaming among the mountains was pleasant even by day, for the sub-tropical heat of the sun was tempered by the pleasant breeze that blew inland from the ocean. Although they never went abroad for a ramble without taking their guns along with them, of sport, properly so-called, there was but little. They managed to make several good bags of rock rabbits, nevertheless. These funny little creatures are as much like rats as rabbits, but they are delicious eating. It was quite half a day’s journey to reach their haunts, over the hills and through the stunted bush, and across broad uplands where little else save a kind of hard, tough grass grew, and walking among which was dangerous, owing to the number of deadly snakes that slept or crept among it. Beyond this there would be more bush, in which bright-winged but songless birds flitted noiselessly about, then the rocks or cliffs where dwelt the coneys.