54 HOME LIFE ON AN OSTRICH FARM. 



trouble and expense that farms can be kept compara- 

 tively free from it. Sometimes a little party of Kaffirs 

 would be encamped on some part of our land especially 

 overgrown with prickly pears ; and there for months 

 together they would be at work, cutting in pieces and 

 rooting out the intruders ; piling the disjointed stems and 

 leaves in neatly-arranged stacks, where they would 

 soon ferment and decay. Labour being dear in the 

 colony, the wages of " prickly-pear-men " form a large 

 item in the expenditure of a farm ; in many places 

 indeed, where the plants are very numerous, it does not 

 pay to clear the land, which consequently becomes 

 useless, many farms being thus ruined. 



Sometimes ostriches, with that equal disregard of 

 their own health and of their possessor's pocket for 

 which they are famous, help themselves to prickly pears, 

 acquire a morbid taste for them, and go on indulging 

 in them, reckless of the long, stiff spikes on the leaves, 

 with which their poor heads and necks soon become 

 so covered as to look like pin-cushions stuck full of 

 pins; and of the still more cruel, almost invisible 

 fruit- thorns which at last line the interior of their 

 throats, besides so injuring their eyes that they be- 

 come perfectly blind, and are unable to feed themselves. 



Many a time has a poor unhappy ostrich, the victim 

 of prickly pear, been brought to me in a helpless, 

 half-dead state, to be nursed and fed at the house. 

 Undaunted by previous experience, I perseveringly 

 tended each case, hoping it might prove the exception 

 to the general rule, but never were my care and 



