2110-1-9-10

High Commissioner's Office, Johannesburg,

Feb. 3:: 1902

My dear old Nan

I was delighted to get your letter on Saturday. I hope you got my missing letter safely. I expect the boat was delayed or something - there are so many things that might happen, and you must just make up your mind for them. You will long ere this have had letters from P. Elizabeth. Mother still writes in very good spirits.

Your account of the weather and the hills makes me very envious. Here we are

once more plunged in brilliant sunshine. I had a very busy week. On Monday old Grey of Pretoria, the Presbyterian minister called on us. He is a very fine looking old fellow and comes from Eddleston. He was deported from Pretoria for preaching against old Kruger as the Beast in Revelations: and at once went & joined Buller's Army in Natal where he was greatly loved by the Gordons. People say he would have got a D.S.O. if he had only been Church of England

We are getting on swimmingly with our

Land Settlement, and buying farms all over the country. I went through to Pretoria to see Lord K. [Kitchener] about some things, and lunched with General Maxwell. Lady M. is an absurd American-Parisian creature with a lisp, but very plucky and kind[.] On Saturday evening we held a great Oxford dinner with H.E. in the chair. It went off very well.

I had letters on Saturday from Malcolm McCaskell, Sandy Gillon, Mrs Johnstone-Douglas, a Highland minister, who used to sit next me in Jones's class, & from Dr Vallon,

who goes off to Constantinople this month. Sandy Gillon writes of what he calls "the everlasting hell". He has been risking his life on a Winter Expedition with what I call the Scottish Mountaineering Club, in Perthshire. You will be sorry to hear that old Johnstone-Douglas's confidential clerk swindled him out of a good many thousand pounds, & then committed suicide. Another undeserved blow for that innocent family! Mrs Douglas says they will have to go abroad for a time till their Dumfriesshire

house is ready.

I have taken to re-reading Dickens lately and have enjoyed him immensely, especially 'Pickwick'. By the by you might send me a copy of the 'Pilgrim's Progress'. (There is a nice little Edition in the World's Classics, published by Grant Richards). If you leave the ends open it will come quite cheaply; book-post is almost the only thing that isn't