money to the stern parents; and both Tom and Jack went through a most graphic pantomime with a stick of the consequences to themselves, adding that their father said both the beating from him and the fine from us served them right for their carelessness.  It seemed so hard they should suffer both ways, and they were so good-tempered and uncomplaining about it, that I fear I shall find it very difficult to stop any threepenny pieces out of their wages in future.  A Kafir servant usually gets one pound a month, his clothes and food.  The former consists of a shirt and short trousers of coarse check cotton, a soldier’s old great-coat for winter, and plenty of mealy-meal for “scoff.”  If he is a good servant and worth making comfortable, you give him a trifle every week to buy meat.  Kafirs are very fond of going to their kraals, and you have to make them sign an agreement to remain with you so many months, generally six.  By the time you have just taught them, with infinite pains and trouble, how to do their work, they depart, and you have to begin it all over again.

I frequently see the chiefs or indunas of chiefs passing here on their way to some kraals which lie just over the hills.  These kraals consist of half a dozen or more large huts, exactly like so many huge beehives, on the slope of a hill.  There is a rude attempt at sod-fencing round them; a few head of cattle graze in the neighborhood; lower down, the hillside is roughly scratched by the women with crooked hoes to form a mealy-ground. (Cows and mealies are all they require except snuff or tobacco, which they smoke out of a cow’s horn.) They seem a very gay and cheerful people, to judge by the laughter and jests I hear from the groups returning to these kraals every day by the road just outside our fence.  Sometimes one of the party carries an umbrella; and I assure you the effect of a tall, stalwart Kafir, clad either in nothing at all or else in a sack, carefully guarding his bare head with a tattered Gamp, is very ridiculous.  Often some one walks along playing upon a rude pipe, whilst the others jog before and after him, laughing and capering like boys let loose from school, and all chattering loudly.  You never meet a man carrying a burden unless he is a white settler’s servant.  When a chief or the induna of a kraal passes this way, I see him, clad in a motley garb of red regimentals with his bare “ringed” head, riding a sorry nag, only the point of his great toe resting in his stirrup.  He is followed closely and with great empressement by his “tail,” all “ringed” men also—­that is, men of some substance and weight in the community.  They carry bundles of sticks, and keep up with the ambling nag, and are closely followed by some of his wives bearing heavy loads on their heads, but stepping out bravely with beautiful erect carriage, shapely bare arms and legs; and some sort of coarse drapery worn across their bodies, covering them from shoulder to knee in folds which would delight an artist’s eye and be the despair of a sculptor’s chisel.  They don’t look either oppressed or discontented.  Happy, healthy and jolly are the words by which they would be most truthfully described.  Still, they are lazy, and slow to appreciate any benefit from civilization except the money, but then savages always seem to me as keen and sordid about money as the most civilized mercantile community anywhere.