ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 



40 



people than those, both English and Dutch, who are at 

 this moment engaged in the great and difficult task of add- 

 ing East Africa to the domain of civilization; their work 

 is bound to be hard enough anyhow; and it would be a 

 lamentable calamity to render it more difficult by keeping 

 alive a bitterness which has lost all point and justification, 

 or by failing to recognize 

 the fundamental virtues, 

 the fundamental charac- 

 teristics, in which the 

 men of the two stocks 

 are in reality so much 

 alike. 



Messrs. Klopper and 

 Loijs, whose farms I vis- 

 ited, were doing well; the 

 latter, with three of his 

 sons, took me out with 

 pride to show me the 

 dam which they had built 

 across a dry watercourse, 

 so as to make a storage 

 reservoir when the rains 

 came. The houses were 

 of stone, and clean and 

 comfortable; the floors 

 were covered with the 

 skins of buck and zebra; 

 the chairs were home-made, as was most of the other 

 furniture; the "rust bunks," or couches, strongly and grace- 

 fully shaped, and filled with plaited raw hide, were so 

 attractive that I ordered one to take home. There were 

 neatly kept little flower-gardens, suffering much from the 

 drought; there were ovens and out-buildings; cattle-sheds 

 for the humped oxen and the herds of pretty cows and 

 calves; the biltong was drying in smoke-houses; there 

 were patches of ground in cultivation, for corn and veg- 



Klopper and Prinsloo, the two Boers working 

 on Sir Alfred's Ranch 



Frit m a photograph fry Kermit Roosevelt 



