A “Tommy” sitting at the speaker’s feet looked up and said:  “What are yer makin’ sich a song abart it far?  Lumme, them Horstraliars are as Hinglish has hi ham!”

InA Boer town.

Bethany.

A Boer town is not laid out on systematic lines, as one sees towns in America, or Canada, or Australia.  The streets seem to run much as they please, or as the exigencies of traffic have caused them to run.  I doubt if the plan of a town is ever drawn in this country.  People arrive and settle down in a happy-go-lucky manner, and straightway build themselves a home.  Their homes are places to live in; not to look at.  There is an almost utter absence of architectural adornment everywhere.  My eyes range over a large number of dwellings.  They are nearly all alike—­plain, square structures, plastered snow white.  There is a double door in the centre of the front, and a window at each side of the door.  A stoep, about six feet wide, rises a foot from the pathway, and there is nothing else to be seen from the outside front.  These houses look bare and bald, and are as expressionless as a blind baby.  To me most houses have an expression of their own.  In an English town a quiet walk in the dawning, making a survey of the dwelling-places, always leaves the impression that I have gleaned an insight into the character of the dwellers therein.  The cheeky-looking villa, with its superabundance of ornament, is a monument in masonry to the successful mining jobber on a small scale.  The solemn-looking, solid dwelling, standing in its own grounds, where every flower bush has its individual prop, where the lawn is trimmed with mathematical exactitude, and not one vagrant leaf is allowed to stray, speaks with a kind of brick-and-mortar eloquence of virtue that has never grasped the sublime fulness of the Scriptural text which saith:  “The way of transgressors is hard!” That is the home of the middle-aged Churchman, whose feet from infancy have fallen amidst roses.  He has never erred, because he has never known enough of human sympathy and human toil and struggle to feel temptation.  The coy little cottage further on, surrounded by climbing roses and sweet-smelling herbs, where the gate is left just a little bit open, as if inviting a welcome, seems to advertise itself as the home of two maiden sisters, who, though past the giddy girlhood stage, still have hopes of being somebody’s darling by-and-by.

But in a Boer town most of the piety is knocked out of a man.  You stare at the houses, and they stare back at you dumbly.  There is nothing pretentious or rakish about any of them; no matter how riotous a man’s imagination might be, he could never conjure up a “wink” from a Boer house, though I have seen houses in other parts of the world that seemed to “cock an eye” at a passing traveller and invite him to try the door.