66 HOME LIFE ON AN OSTRICH FARM. 



bedroom and store at the back ; and plastering and 

 whitewashing the dirty old bricks and the too-clean 

 new ones ; nothing can ever make it anything but an 

 ugly house as far as the outside is concerned. With the 

 interior, however, we have been more successful ; and 

 our sitting-room, now consisting of a T-shaped arrange- 

 ment of three small rooms thrown into one, is really — 

 considering the roughness of the materials with which 

 we started — a very bright and cosy little nook. It is 

 most quaint and irregular, for one end of it is a room 

 of the crookedly-built Dutch house ; and when the 

 strong old wall, three feet thick, dividing the latter 

 from the new part, was knocked away, the old ceiling 

 and floor turned out to be considerably lower than the 

 new. We dignify the deep step thus formed by the 

 name of " the dais." 



The latest-added portion of the room — built from 



T 's own design — is the prettiest of all ; and the bow 



window at the end, always filled with banana-plants, 

 ferns, creepers, garden and wild flowers, forms quite 

 a little conservatory. Though disappointed of our 

 Moorish court, we could not give up the idea of our 

 fountain without a struggle, and attempted to establish 

 it on a very small scale in this little room; in the cement 

 floor of which, not far from the bow window, we made 

 a round basin some four feet deep, which we filled with 

 water. Then we wrote to Walmer for some roots of 

 our favourite blue lotus ; with which, and with the 

 arums' white cups, the surface of the water was to be 

 studded ; and by-and-by — we thought — as soon as the 



