Vrouw Grobelaar. "I know you.
But you're wrong. You don't know anything. Young girls in
these days are like young pigs, all squeak and fight, but
no bacon. Didn't the brother of my half-brother's wife die
of a witch's devilry?"

"I'm sure I don't know," returned hapless Katje.

"Well, he did. I'll tell you." The old lady settled herself
comfortably and lapsed into history.

"His name was Fanie, and he was a Van der Merwe on his
father's side, but his mother was only a Prinsloo, though
her mother was a Coetzee, for the matter of that. He wasn't
what I should call good--at least, not always; but he was
very big and strong, and made a lot of noise, and folk
liked him. The women used to make black white to prove that
the things he did and said were proper things, although
they'd have screamed all night if their own men-folk had
done the same. They say, you know," said the Vrouw
Grobelaar, quoting a very old and seldom-heard Dutch
proverb, "that when women pray they think of God as a
handsome man.

"What I didn't like about him was his way with the Kafirs.
A Kafir is more useful than a dog after all, and one
shouldn't be always beating and kicking even a dog. And
Fanie could never pass a Kafir without kicking him or
flicking his whip at him. I have seen all the Kafirs run to
their kraals when they saw him riding up the road.

"There was one old Kafir we had,--very old and weak, and no
use at all. He used to sit by the gate all day, and mumble
to himself, and seem to look at things that weren't there.
His head was quite white with age, which is not a common
thing with Kafirs, as you know; and he was so foolish and
helpless that his people used to feed him with a spiked
stick, like a motherless chicken. And in case the fowls
should go and sit on his back while he crouched in the sun,
as I have seen them do, there was a little Kafir picaninny,
as black as a crow, that was sent to play about near him
every day. Dear Lord! I have seen those two sitting there,
looking at each other for an hour on end, without a word,
as though both had been children or both old men. Nobody
minded them: we used to throw sugar to the picaninny, and
watch him fighting with the fowls for it, rolling about on
his little black belly like a new-hatched duckling himself.

"Well, Fanie, ... it was horrible. . . .

"I don't like to think of it to this day. He came over one
day in a great hurry to tell us that August de Villiers,
the father