CLIMATE OF THE KARROO. 77 



to obtain a footing in that perfect climate. T , for 



instance, who from childhood had been subject to severe 

 attacks of asthma, was completely cured by his residence 

 on the ostrich farms; and a troublesome remittent fever, 

 caught in the West Indies, from which I had suiFered, 

 off and on, during seven years, left me entirely from the 

 time we went to live at Swaylands. There seems, indeed, 

 to be much of truth in the boastful assertion one so often 

 hears, " No one is ever ill here ! " and the wonder is, 

 not that doctors are so sparsely distributed through- 

 out the Karroo, but that they ever think it worth 

 while to settle there at all. People live quite con- 

 tentedly two or more days' drive from the nearest 

 doctor — medical help from Port Elizabeth being 

 equally, if not more, inaccessible, owing to the fact 

 that the train does not run every day — and from year's 

 end to year's end they not only are never ill, but seem 

 also quite exempt from the usual accidents which in 

 other parts of the world are apt to befall humanity. 

 They go out shooting, and their horses buck them off — 

 a trifling, everyday event which is taken as a matter 

 of course ; they gallop recklessly across the veldt, over 

 ground so full of treacherous holes that a horse is 

 liable at any moment to get a sudden and ugly fall — 

 indeed, he often does, but the colonist always rises 

 unhurt ; they drive home late at night along the 

 roughest of roads, at a furious pace — often after im- 

 bibing far more than is usually conducive to safety — 

 and their Cape carts or American spiders very naturally 

 tumble into sluits, run into wire fences, perform somer- 



