22 A NATURALIST IN THE TRANSVAAL. 



Government have to an extent prohibited these burnings ; 

 but as the practice is carried on by the Boers, who are 

 a law unto themselves, the enactment is more honoured 

 in the breacli than in the observance. 



The Boer farmer usually passes his time in riding 

 about or sitting in his house smoking and drinking 

 coffee. His vrow sees to the house-work, his sons 

 drive the ox-wagon. The living is wretchedly poor 

 and vilely cooked, but the Boer has few wants and is 

 happy if left alone. Kafirs do the farm-work, which 

 is principally attending to the cattle, who neither re- 

 quire food nor water, as the veld provides the first, and 

 they are always kept where some small stream can be 

 found. These people retire to bed at about 7 P.M., but 

 rise early. Illiterate and uneducated to a greater 

 extent than our own rustic population, they possess 

 a keen and intelligent grasp of the government and 

 politics of the Transvaal, and in this respect are 

 intellectually superior to our own men of the shires. 

 They have won their position by hard fighting and hard 

 living. Forty years ago they had to wage war with 

 lions and leopards on their farms, where now scarcely 

 a buck is to be seen, and not only did they struggle 

 against wild beasts, but sustained sanguinary Kafir 

 fights. They showed no mercy to one or the other, 

 but fixed their boundaries and protected their farms. 

 They are the nearest present approach to the old 

 Hebrew patriarchs ; like them they value wealth in 

 flocks and herds, and, away from the world in almost 

 lonely wilderness, worship God, and often possess the 

 same strong and unruled passions as were exhibited by 

 some of the biblical personages. Wild tales of wild 

 doings are sometimes told as having occurred in far- 

 away farms ; but I incline to the view that these are 

 often exaggerated and that the average Boer is, accord- 

 ing to his lights, a citizen pioneer, and a rough, God- 

 fearing, honest, homely, uneducated philistine. 



My Boer friend once showed me the two books 

 which appeared to form his library ; they were both 

 large Bibles one in Dutch, which he read ; the other in 



