-morrow and the day after, he will
be dancing a most unholy dance or be making love to "Dinah," filling in the
intervals by cursing in three different languages stray horses that steal
our fodder.

It is really astonishing what a difference the weather makes to the morals
of the South African nigger. Give him plenty of sunshine, and he forgets he
ever had a soul, and throws slabs of blasphemy, picked up from the Tommies
around him, with painful liberality. When he gets tired of English oaths,
he drops into Cape Dutch, and some of the curses contained in that language
are solid enough to hurt anything they hit. Later on he drifts into his
native tongue, raises his voice a couple of octaves, and streaks the
atmosphere with multi-coloured oaths, until you imagine you are listening
to a vocal rainbow. But take away the sunshine, give him a wet hide and a
wet floor to camp on, and he straightway becomes all penitence and prayer.
His face, peering out dismally between the upturned collar of his
weather-stained coat and the down-drawn brim of his battered hat, looks
like a soiled sermon, and he is altogether woeful.

When the weather is warm he decks himself out in any piece of gaudy finery
he can lay hands upon. He loves to wear a glaring yellow roll of silk or
cloth around his hat, a blue or green 'kerchief about his throat, and a
crimson girdle encircled about his loins. Then he thinks he is a midsummer
sunset, and swaggers round like a peacock in full plumage, looking for
something to "mash." He has no sense of the eternal law of averages. It
does not trouble him if the whole seat of his most important garment is
represented by a hole big enough to put a baby in, if he only has the
artistic decorations I have mentioned above. Nor does he see anything out
of the way in the fact that one of his feet is encased in an officer's top
boot and the other in a remnant of a Boer farmer's cast-off veldtschoon.
His soul yearns towards feathers. He will pluck a grand white plume from
the tail of an ostrich if he gets a favourable opportunity, and place it
triumphantly in his torn and soiled slouch hat, or he will pick up a
discarded bonnet from a dust pile and rob it of feathers placed there by
feminine hands, in order that he may look a black Beau Brummell.

His manners, like his morals, change with the weather. When the barometer
registers "fine and clear," you may expect a saucy answer if you rate him
for a late breakast; when it r