94 SOME BIRDS OF SOUTH AFRICA 



exceedingly tall, being considerably over six feet in 

 height. 



My friend Mr. H. and I put up at Houw Hoek for 

 ten days or so, and the landlord, whom I will call Mr. 

 W., made us very comfortable. He was a hale, gruff- 

 voiced, cheery old man, who had come out from Eng- 

 land some twenty or thirty years ago ; and if he was 

 rather too fond of looking upon his family as children, 

 he at least equalised the matter by considering himself 

 to be ten or fifteen years younger than he really was. 



Living in a district which, although very thinly in- 

 habited, was strongly dominated over by votaries of the 

 Bond party, Mr. W. was exceedingly progressive him- 

 self, spelt either with a big or a little />, and the Cape 

 Dutch farmers, as they drove by his lands, would 

 wonder in their dour, silent way, at all his improve- 

 ments. He was on good enough terms with them, he 

 knew how to treat them, and when you may be five or 

 ten miles from your nearest neighbour there is no 

 occasion for quarrelling. These men were overbearing 

 at first, but he had lived clown all that. 



The nights up at Houw Hoek in September are 

 cold, a fire being often welcome in the evenings, and 

 as Mr. W. stoops down to put on another log he re- 

 marks that when we get to fifty-five here he looks at 

 us hard, and pauses we shall be glad of a bit of fire. 

 He had quite a small library of books in his comfort- 

 able kitchen, and some old Chippendale chairs, these 

 latter being articles of furniture rarely seen in this land, 

 where everything is new. He was always ready with 

 some awe-inspiring tale of the "tiger," as the colonists 

 call the leopard, and how it had come sometimes and 



