Pretoria Seen Through American Spectacles.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume II, Issue 153, 24 May 1900, Page 3

Pretoria Seen Through American Spectacles.

Writing in the April Harper's, Mr Howard Hillegas gives a very rose-coloured view of Pretoria just before the war. Perhaps this is 1 partly explained by his remark that the President sent a Boer emissary and a carriage to the railway station for the visitor, with a rnessaga that he desired all Americans to have ample opportunities oi! observing tho justice of his government and people, and that he know Mr Hillegas would tell his countrymen the truth. These attentions predisposed the visitor to find Pretoria a city of peace, and Johannesburg a Bedlam. Pretoria has great natural advantages, and is said to be the only city in the interior of South Africa Jit for white men to inhabit. Tha traveller by train passes through tho torrid, dusty, lifeless veldt of the Orange Free State and lower Transvaal, where the towns ace widely separated by desolate tracts still 'tenanted 'by wild deer, ostriches and buzzards, and where the landscape is mado ap of yellow grass, dust clouds and blaming sky. Aifcsr the modern city of the Oufclanders, JohannosI burg, came thirty miles of veldt again, then the facaous gold-bearing Witwa-tersrand, where the train meanders among hundreds of mine surface works. Then the traveller reaches the hill country — tho first ■the -Boers found after their trek across the Drakenberg. The entrance to Pretoria is guarded on both sides by. lofty, barren hills, called the Magalies Mountains, surmounted by extensive forts. Beyond is a peaceful valley which, from a distance looks one soiid mass of green willows ; among them aro gorgeous tropical ground flowers and creepers, but the burrounding hill-sides are covered with brown, grass. The town ie very picturesque, with ifcs goldeh statue of Liberty set on the lofly capitol, its white buildings, quaint ' Dutch architecture, ihe broad street's bordered on each side' by spreading willows, the stately Government Buildings made of stone, the Dutch church in Govern manfc square, surrounded bj white-roofed waggons of the communicants who comoin to celebrate Nachtmaal. Tbe~se waggons and the long ox-teams from tho back country, together with the numbers of -half-clad natives, formed a contrast to the American electric trams, the scores of bicycles, the elestric light and telephone wires. In the b°st resi- ( dential-stceets -the D-utch cottages 5

have their iose-feaot, a^r.-yL-ccopped lawn, girden b&J an" fountain, and no signs of che dirtiness twuellerb ha iT o foirnd amongst the i. 1 rating pcxju'.it'v^" Perhaps the \vell-to-f~lo JjOci* h'nsewiie is nut quite .so b^acl. a^ it pai ited, but the Gmcinna^.s i-t the Volksraatl is rather nut (•!' ilale and in some other rloVi'n v/c are more likely to t;.isi Uic wicked English correspondents, who Mr Hillefifas assured uc- 1 were sent to Pretoria by tbci<* respective 'papers on pivp, <-c io misrepresflnt the Boer and I'l'-urn public feeling for the war.