230 Among Men and Horses. 



unproductive, and the high price of labour restricts the 

 amount of tillage within very narrow limits. Despite high 

 protective duties, the most of the corn, and even of the flour, 

 is imported. So backward is the practice of agriculture, 

 that market gardening is almost unknown, except in Natal, 

 where it is assiduously and profitably carried on by natives 

 of India. The most of the vegetables eaten by white men 

 are imported in tins ! So scarce are fresh vegetables in 

 up-country towns, that, as a rule, those which come into 

 the market, are auctioned off singly. It is nothing un- 

 common to see a cauliflower which in England would cost 

 twopence, knocked down to the highest bidder at three 

 shillings. Throughout Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange 

 Free State and the Transvaal, there are lots of well-watered 

 ground admirably suited for market gardening, which land 

 might be cheaply purchased ; but no one seems anxious 

 to enter into such a sound speculation. ' They are too lazy or 

 too well-off/ you, my readers, will possibly remark. Neither 

 alternative, I think, quite explains the case, which is, more 

 probably, one arising out of the unsettled state of men's 

 minds in South Africa, where booms and collapses have 

 followed each other in demoralisingly rapid succession. 

 The farmers have few wants. A suit of clothes lasts them 

 for years. They don't buy books, back horses, smoke any 

 tobacco which they don't grow, drink any liquor which 

 they don't make, or eat any food which their farms do not 

 produce. They don't keep fast society, gamble, go to 

 theatres, or ' take any delight out of themselves,' as we say 

 in Ireland. With a minimum of trouble, they make more 

 than they can spend with raising cattle, Angora goats, 

 merino sheep and ostriches. It is not likely that they 

 should bother about anything which cannot propagate and 

 develop itself without assistance. I am afraid that some 

 of them are just a little lazy; for I have known several 

 instances of these gentlemen buying harness horses, when 

 they had hundreds of animals running wild on their land ; 



