A DUCK DRIVE 281 



spruit intersected bog or marshland, were the favourite 

 feeding grounds of common and painted snipe, green- 

 shanks, avocets, stilts, plover, sacred ibises, and other 

 species of wading birds. Several different kinds of herons 

 and cranes used also to frequent this piece of water ; 

 amongst them grey, purple and white herons, crested 

 cranes, and hammerkops. 



Well do I remember my first acquaintance with the 

 place. I was jogging quietly across the veldt, after an 

 early morning visit to the then recently imported pack 

 of English fox -hounds, which were kennelled at Gelden- 

 huis, when a bunch of duck passed over my head, and I 

 marked them down into the lagoon in question. Upon 

 nearer approach I discovered that the pan of water was 

 simply alive with different kinds of aquatic fowl, of the 

 names of some of which I was ignorant, paddling in and 

 out of the network of open channels amongst the dense 

 carpet -like growths of beautiful lilies and other water 

 plants. Determining to pay a visit to the place at an 

 early date, I cantered into town, and that very same 

 evening made arrangements with a couple of English 

 mining engineers and a Boer lawyer to visit the dam 

 two days later. 



Shortly before dawn of the appointed morning my 

 friends and myself, accompanied by a numerous following 

 of blubber-lipped natives, left the slumbering and odorous 

 (the sanitary men were hard at work) city behind us, 

 and once free of tailing heaps, headgears, noisy stamp 

 batteries, and gold mines generally, we set out in a bee-line 



