While the neat old woman was cooking it, up
galloped five fine lads and two pretty flaxen-haired girls,
With
real German faces, on wild little horses; and one girl tucked up
her habit, and waited at table, while another waved a green bough
to drive off the swarms of flies. The chops were excellent, ditto
bread and butter, and the tea tolerable. The parlour was a tiny
room with a mud floor, half-hatch door into the front, and the two
bedrooms still tinier and darker, each with two huge beds which
filled them entirely. But Choslullah was right; they were
perfectly clean, with heaps of beautiful pillows; and not only none
of the creatures of which he spoke with infinite terror, but even
no fleas. The man was delighted to talk to me. His wife had
almost forgotten German, and the children did not know a word of
it, but spoke Dutch and English. A fine, healthy, happy family.
It was a pretty picture of emigrant life. Cattle, pigs, sheep, and
poultry, and pigeons innumerable, all picked up their own living,
and cost nothing; and vegetables and fruit grow in rank abundance
where there is water. I asked for a book in the evening, and the
man gave me a volume of Schiller. A good breakfast, - and we paid
ninepence for all.
This morning we started before eight, as it looked gloomy, and came
through a superb mountain defile, out on to a rich hillocky
country, covered with miles of corn, all being cut as far as the
eye could reach, and we passed several circular threshing-floors,
where the horses tread out the grain. Each had a few mud hovels
near it, for the farmers and men to live in during harvest.
Altogether, I was most lucky, had two beautiful days, and enjoyed
the journey immensely. It was most 'abentheuerlich'; the light
two-wheeled cart, with four wild little horses, and the marvellous
brown driver, who seemed to be always going to perdition, but made
the horses do apparently impossible things with absolute certainty;
and the pretty tiny boy who came to help his uncle, and was so
clever, and so preternaturally quiet, and so very small: then the
road through the mountain passes, seven or eight feet wide, with a
precipice above and below, up which the little horses scrambled;
while big lizards, with green heads and chocolate bodies, looked
pertly at us, and a big bright amber-coloured cobra, as handsome as
he is deadly, wriggled across into a hole.
Nearly all the people in this village are Dutch. There is one
Malay tailor here, but he is obliged to be a Christian at Caledon,
though Choslullah told me with a grin, he was a very good Malay
when he went to Capetown. He did not seem much shocked at this
double religion, staunch Mussulman as he was himself. I suppose
the blacks 'up country' are what Dutch slavery made them - mere
animals - cunning and sulky.
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