The local grandees liberally prepared for the coming feast, and having eaten to repletion proceeded to fill their pockets.
“You may as well have the sauce,” once interposed an irate A.D.C. as he saw a native pocketing a fowl, and he deliberately poured the contents of a tureen into his lap.
At these “go-as-you-please” functions, speeches more or less impromptu invariably took place, and it was then that the “Colonel” was literally in his element.
Panting for his opportunity, it was only after some wag had proposed his health, and described how we had “one amongst us who had seen the mighty buffalo on its native prairie” (which he assuredly never had), etc., that the Colonel rose and delighted his hearers with a string of most amusing lies.
Lady Shand, the wife of the Chief Justice, once sitting near him, after one of his flowery orations, began to tell him of her own native home in Scotland, and of the loch that stretched for miles before the ancestral hall, and was considerably surprised by the Colonel’s rejoinder: “Aye, and the swans; I can see them now.”
“But there were no swans, Colonel,” she gently corrected; but henceforth held her peace when the staggering retort was given: “Oh, yes there were; at least, in my time.”
No function was considered complete without “the Colonel,” and he was a frequent guest at one place or another. Apparently capable of dispensing with sleep, no matter how late the night’s orgy daylight found him on the verandah with a green cigar, after which he proceeded towards the Grand river ostensibly to bathe.
“Can’t do without my morning swim,” he once told a man who met him with a bath-towel over his arm; but the towel showed no signs of having been used, and it was recognised that the Colonel never stripped, and that his ablutions were primitive to a degree.
But the Cape Town of to-day has undergone quite as much change as our modern Babylon, and where a railway station as big as St. Pancras now exists, a wooden shanty with a single line fifty miles long was all that represented railway enterprise in the long-ago sixties.
It was by the courtesy of Captain Mills, the Assistant Colonial Secretary—afterwards Sir Charles Mills, agent general in London—that a delightful party was organised for the shooting of the “Sicker Vlei,” a vast expanse of water in the vicinity of Wellington.