14 A NATURALIST IN THE TRANSVAAL. 



restaurateur no longer reaps a harvest from champagne- 

 drinking customers, and machinery can be bought for 

 almost half its cost in London, with the loss of the 

 heavy transport cost to the Transvaal. But recently 

 the " booms " of Kimberley and Barberton had found a 

 home in Johannesburg, but now it is merely an abode 

 of baffled financiers, unemployed promoters, and more 

 or less ruined shareholders. But Johannesburg will as 

 surely recover from this depression as the French 

 Republic shook off the disaster of Sedan, but it will be 

 only on the ruins of the gambler's wreck with which it 

 is now strewn. The present dreadfully monotonous 

 appearance of the town will be altered when the nume- 

 rous plantations of trees, which are now growing well, 

 shall have grown more, and perhaps of all towns in the 

 Transvaal, Johannesburg has the future. Even now, in 

 1891, improvement has commenced, and, as an acquaint- 

 ance told me in Pretoria, " I can now go to Johannes- 

 burg without all my old friends wanting to borrow 

 money of me." Everywhere you are told the same tale 

 by men with whom the times are now hopelessly out of 

 joint " If I had only realized in time I could have 

 gone home with a fortune." One speculator was 

 pointed out to me who three years back came up from 

 the Cape to Johannesburg with scarcely five shillings ; 

 he turned company promoter, and twelve months since 

 could have realized scrip for at least 80,000 (some said 

 120,000). At the time I saw him he was not worth 

 five pounds. The same thing occurred at the collapse 

 of the " boom " at Barberton. I met a man who had 

 been a canteen keeper there, and who told me he 

 opened a small bar and billiard-room in that town when 

 it was at the height of its pseudo-financial prosperity. 

 As soon as finished he was offered 2000 for it, then 

 75 per month for four years, .both of which proposals 

 he refused. The collapse occurred shortly afterwards, 

 and he sold the place for scarcely the price of the furni- 

 ture and fittings. He sold, as he told me, "because 

 there was no one who could afford to come in and take 

 a drink." 



