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