150 SOUTH AGAIN : NEW ZEALAND AND THE CAPE 



having long yellow hatchet faces, curious noses of sorts, 

 yellow whites to their eyes, and are said to have no hvers, 

 whence I suppose the bile is deposited elsewhere, in the 

 face, eyes, etc., and even so much as to affect their tempers, 

 for some are hypochondriac and others highly irritable ; 

 they are gregarious, and frequently live in boarding houses. 

 . . . Baron Ludwig ^ received me with the greatest kindness 

 and wished me to stay at his house, which I declined, not 

 seeing any occasion to trouble him, and having a great deal 

 of shopping to do, which I wished to effect in the cool of 

 the evening, when he would expect me to sit at home. I 

 breakfasted and lunched there, however. His house is one 

 of the best in Cape Town, with a noble drawing-room, 

 handsomely furnished with two busts of his noble self, one 

 of the late Baroness and one of the poet Schiller. My 

 Father's picture used to hang there before, but was not now, 

 and of course I did not ask for it. He, my Father, has given 

 way to William of Wiirtemberg, who so graciously showered 

 down the crosses and snuff-box on him of Cape Town, which 

 emblems you may remember in the Crescent. I found 

 * Peter Schlemihl ' in his Library and could not help reading 

 part of it for old acquaintance sake ; it was the very copy 

 my Grandfather gave him ; tell this to the dear old man 

 and how many associations and thoughts of him it brought 

 up ; his own handwriting ascribing it to Chamisso was on 

 the title page. I think I was more pleased to have found 

 that book of my dear Grandfather's than with anything 

 else in Cape Town ; I had a great mind to steal it. 



It has struck me very forcibly during both my visits 

 to the Cape, that there is in the Colony a most remarkable 

 want of ^ a love for flowers, which I always thought so 

 pecuUarly a Dutch taste, but so it is. Look here, the only 

 Eucalypti and Casuarinas I have anywhere seen, are in 

 Ludwig's garden ; but though they are planted by him for 



1 Baron C. F. H. von Ludwig (ca. 1784-1847), Ph.D., chemist and botanist, 

 left his native Wiirtemberg in 1804 for the Cape, where he founded a Botanic 

 Garden, Ludwigsburg, and became Vice-President of the South African 

 Literary and Scientific Institute, and a member of the Cape Association for 

 Exploring Central Africa. He was a correspondent of Sir William Hooker, 

 who, in dedicating to him the 62nd vol. of the Botanical Magazine in 1835, 

 made special mention of the rare and beautiful plants with which he had 

 enriched Europe, and called him the Friend and Patron of Botany. He 

 visited Great Britain in 1836-7. 



