2110-1-11-6

Oct: 9: 1902

My venerable Nan

I am writing this week's letter before the English mail comes in, as to-morrow I have to go off to the North for four days, to a place called Springbok Flats to see what is happening to a settlement there. I shall have to ride all day & every day, and shall no doubt be blistered by the sun.

H.E. is off this week making a wild tour among the Repatriation Depots in the east, and I am just finishing off our two Lands Ordinances, which I hope will be passed next week.

You can have no idea how beautiful the weather is just now. It is a mistake to say there is no spring in S. Africa. For the last week we have had cold nights with showers morning & evening, & soft delicious days

with white clouds in the sky. The veld is getting a most brilliant green, and our garden is one blaze of roses. I never saw such a place for roses, hundreds on each bush, and our rooms smell like a rose garden.

Last weekend I made a wild rush with Hugh [Honourable Hugh Wyndham] to the Swazi Border on business. We travelled all night both ways, & crept out of the train in the grey dawning to mount horses. I had a lovely little

fawn-coloured Arab stallion to ride, who was a pretty handful. I found things going very well all over the district. In some of the farm-houses I found clean-scrubbed floors, & old women in mutches, just like Scotland. The landscape, too, is very Scotch. You ride up long green glens, with a blue mountain at the top, and a fine full stream in the valley bottom. Every little side glen has a clear burn of its own. Altogether

it was a most pleasant and homelike country.

George Hunter, from Standlan, turned up the other day, very Peeblesshire. I am trying to get him a billet, for his ideas are not extravagant. He likes the Boers, but "doesna like thae South Africans", in which I must agree with him.

The Master of Elibank has departed – to my relief, but now