But when you can open your eyes, strange-looking people and strange things meet them. At the hotel, you were waited upon by Bengalese servants, with their fantastically-wound turbans of cashmere nearly the size of a market-basket, their blue gowns reaching to the knee, tied with red riband in front, making their waist appear just under their arms, and moving so stealthily with their bare feet, as they came and went, that you were not conscious of their presence. In the streets you see the high-cheeked-bone Malay, the emaciated-looking cooley, and the red-capped, half-naked, simial-faced Hottentot, whom the mistaken philanthropy of English law has removed from the authority of the Dutch boor, that they may go lower in the scale of humanity. By you wheels some lately-arrived cockney in one of the patent safety cabs from London, the driver perched behind, and slowly following comes a lumbering wagon, its tents covering some large casks, it may be, drawn by sixteen or eighteen yoke of the enormous horned oxen of this colony, who are ever reminded of the proximity of their Hottentot driver, by his unceasing guttural calls and the continual application of his immense whip, whose lash, after being whirled in air an instant, he can cause to descend with unfailing accuracy on the back of any particular ox in his team, though he be a leader. In the windows of the stores you notice the graceful feathers of the ostrich, and its eggs; elephants’ tusks, and those too of the wild boar left in the skull; and the skins of the leopard and lion, remind you that you are where “Afric’s sunny,” &c. Innumerable jargons salute your ear as you move about.
On a bright Saturday morning, a Malay, with a good coach and four very good horses, drove a party of us out to Constantia, famous for the making of the celebrated wine of that name. The distance from town is about nine miles, and the road a very good one. You pass through long rows of the pine-tree, which I saw planted for ornamental effect for the first time, and here and there you see the native silver-tree, its bright leaves glistening prettily in the sun. The residences on the route are very cosy-looking, and much taste is displayed in laying off the approaches to them. A house not long before occupied by Sir Harry Smith, while governor of the colony, was a very attractive place.