arming upward from
the plains pastures below. These people were, to the chief extent,
Wakamba, quite savage, but attracted here by the justness and fair
dealing of the Hills. Some of them farmed on shares with the Hills, the
white men furnishing the land and seed, and the black men the labour;
some of them laboured on wage; some few herded cattle or ostriches; some
were hunters and took the field only when, as now, serious business was
afoot. They had their complete villages, with priests, witch doctors,
and all; and they seemed both contented and fond of the two white men.

As we walked about we learned much of the ostrich business; and in the
course of our ten days' visit we came to a better realization of how
much there is to think of in what appears basically so simple a
proposition.

In the nesting time, then, the Hills went out over the open country,
sometimes for days at a time, armed with long high-power telescopes.
With these fearsome and unwieldy instruments they surveyed the country
inch by inch from the advantage of a kopje. When thus they discovered a
nest, they descended and appropriated the eggs. The latter, hatched at
home in an incubator, formed the nucleus of a flock.

Pass the raising of ostrich chicks to full size through the difficulties
of disease, wild beasts, and sheer cussedness. Of the resultant thirty
birds or so of the season's catch, but two or three will even promise
good production. These must be bred in captivity with other likely
specimens. Thus after several years the industrious ostrich farmer may
become possessed of a few really prime birds. To accumulate a proper
flock of such in a new country is a matter of a decade or so. Extra
prime birds are as well known and as much in demand for breeding as any
blood horse in a racing country. Your true ostrich enthusiast, like the
Hills, possesses trunks full of feathers not good commercially, but
intensely interesting for comparison and for the purposes of prophecy.
While I stayed with them came a rumour of a very fine plucking a distant
neighbour had just finished from a likely two-year-old. The Hills were
manifestly uneasy until one of them had ridden the long distance to
compare this newcomer's product with that of their own two-year-olds.
And I shall never forget the reluctantly admiring shake of the head with
which he acknowledged that it was indeed a "very fine feather!"

But getting the birds is by no means all of ostrich farming, a