The great point to my mind is for the European element to retain the voting power within fixed limits.
After my visit to Victoria County I returned to D’Urban and took train to the capital, Pietermaritzburg. The railway again was all new to me. No pleasant rest at host Padley’s now, no exciting drive round the Inchanga, no gallop over Camperdown Flats! Simply a six hours’ monotonous railway trip.
The first sight I caught and the first hand I grasped on my arrival was that of good Bishop Colenso, who met me at the station. Ten years had passed since last we met, but how delighted was I to see the same penetrating eye, the same majestic figure, the same elastic step, and to hear the same cheery voice as in years gone by. I had a long talk with him and his talented and philanthropic daughter over the events which had occurred during the years that I had been absent from Natal. Church matters and matters of state kept us engaged until evening approached, when the bishop started for Bishopstowe, leaving me to spend the night with my friends in Pietermaritzburg. Bishop Colenso was indeed one of those few men “who never swam with the stream, who bravely strove to stem the current, and regardless alike of popular and aristocratic favor pleaded with his latest breath for what he thought to be right and just.”
Little did I think when he shook me by the hand on getting into his carriage that I should never see him again. It is a benign provision for us mortals that the future is wrapped in obscurity!
I left Pietermaritzburg the next day, June 30th, at 11 A. M., passed Howick and the magnificent falls of the Umgeni, and reached the Plough hotel, Estcourt, where I had a short rest. Leaving there at 2:30 in the morning I arrived at Ladysmith at noon, where we changed horses. The feeling against the “ignoble peace,” as it was called, I found increasing the nearer I approached the seat of the late war. In the hotel where the mail cart changed horses the landlord had just posted up the following notice:
Sacred to the memory of
HONOR,
The beloved wife of John Bull,
She died in the Transvaal and
Was buried at Candahar, March 1881.