188 
A COLONY IN THE MAKING 
CHAP. 
our friends to adopt this last course. They must then 
have a house ; and here to be penny wise is to be 
pound foolish. A good house is essential to and 
almost a guarantee of perfect health. If stone is easily 
available let it be built of stone ; if not, of cedar-wood 
with a shingle roof. In either case a nice little house 
with a sitting-room, two bed-rooms, and a deep 
verandah will cost, roughly, ^150. A kitchen, a hut 
or two, and a rough store will be ^50 more. While 
the house is going up we will have two hundred acres 
ploughed up by contract. There are plenty of con¬ 
tractors, both Dutch and English, who will do this, 
and the cost, unless the clearing is very heavy, to clear, 
plough, and cross-plough will not exceed 30^. an acre, 
or in all ^300. The advantage of contracting is this : 
cultivated land should lie fallow through one rainy 
season, and therefore by contracting a breathing-space 
is given in which to buy ploughs and implements, 
break oxen, and obtain labour. Ploughs, implements, 
and a Scotch cart will come to £ioo, twenty oxen at 
£4. each will be a further £80, and four good sows, 
and a boar perhaps £25 more. A cattle boma and 
rough pig-styes will bring the capital expenditure to 
^685, or, as numerous small items such as furniture, 
at first necessarily of the roughest, have been omitted, 
say £730. We have thus left ^470 for living ex¬ 
penses, twelve months’ working expenses, and, if 
possible, some small insurance against a bad season’s 
crop, a sum just, but barely, sufficient. Living ex¬ 
penses will be managed comfortably, certainly not 
luxuriously, on ^100; labour I put at £7 a month, 
and £2 3 for the harvest month ; ^200 will be kept in 
reserve; and the remaining £70 will surely go in 
repairs and unforeseen contingencies. 
