fe, their interests. One
could hardly believe one was still in the nineteenth century; these
people had the calm, the local seclusion of the prehistoric epoch.
For them, Europe did not exist; they knew it merely as a place where
settlers came from. What the Czar intended, what the Kaiser designed,
never disturbed their rest. A sick ox, a rattling tile on the roof,
meant more to their lives than war in Europe. The one break in the
sameness of their daily routine was family prayers; the one weekly
event, going to church at Salisbury. Still, they had a single
enthusiasm. Like everybody else for fifty miles around, they believed
profoundly in the "future of Rhodesia." When I gazed about me at the raw
new land--the weary flat of red soil and brown grasses--I felt at least
that, with a present like that, it had need of a future.

I am not by disposition a pioneer; I belong instinctively to the old
civilisations. In the midst of rudimentary towns and incipient fields, I
yearn for grey houses, a Norman church, an English thatched cottage.

However, for Hilda's sake, I braved it out, and continued to learn the
A B C of agriculture on an unmade farm with great assiduity from Oom Jan
Willem.

We had been stopping some months at Klaas's together when business
compelled me one day to ride in to Salisbury. I had ordered some goods
for my farm from England which had at last arrived. I had now to arrange
for their conveyance from the town to my plot of land--a portentous
matter. Just as I was on the point of leaving Klaas's, and was
tightening the saddle-girth on my sturdy little pony, Oom Jan Willem
himself sidled up to me with a mysterious air, his broad face all
wrinkled with anticipatory pleasure. He placed a sixpence in my palm,
glancing about him on every side as he did so, like a conspirator.

"What am I to buy with it?" I asked, much puzzled, and suspecting
tobacco. Tant Mettie declared he smoked too much for a church elder.

He put his finger to his lips, nodded, and peered round. "Lollipops
for Sannie," he whispered low, at last, with a guilty smile. "But"--he
glanced about him again--"give them to me, please, when Tant Mettie
isn't looking." His nod was all mystery.

"You may rely on my discretion," I replied, throwing the time-honoured
prejudices of the profession to the winds, and well pleased to aid and
abet the simple-minded soul in his nefarious designs against little
Sannie's digestive apparatus. He patted me on