l--from the other end of the pool. Theirs is the old,
old story, told perhaps in a rougher and less romantic fashion than in
Europe; yet is its refrain as earnest and its aftermath at least as
kindly as in northern lands. The South African Boer makes a true and
constant husband, and a good father--some people say he is a trifle too
uxorious.

At eight o'clock the day is done. The party separates for the night,
after a longish melancholic prayer and a chapter of the great Bible from
Stuurmann. Anna goes to her kartel-bed at the end of the big wagon,
lets down the _achter-klap_, takes off her shoes and sun-bonnet, loosens
a button or two at the throat of her gown, pulls her blanket and
sheepskin kaross well over her sturdy frame, and is almost instantly
asleep. Her father snores loudly from the forepart of the wagon; the
whole camp (including the native "boys" huddled beneath the wagons) is
hushed; while all around broods the wonderful silence of night on the
plains of Bushmanland.

CHAPTER SIX.

PIET VAN STADEN'S WIFE.

It was the year 1877. For months past the wagons of the Trek-Boers had
been standing idly outspanned on the banks of the Crocodile River, [The
Limpopo River is known universally in South Africa as the Crocodile]
waiting for the word to move north-westward and plunge into the unknown
and dreadful deserts that lay between the trekkers and the far-off land
they sought. Scattered among the great trees and bushes that margined
the noble river, the white wagon-tents of these strange people might be
discerned dotting the landscape for the space of a mile and a half and
more. Here were gathered the wildest, toughest, and most daring spirits
of the Transvaal. Elephant-hunters, who longed for new and virgin lands
in which to procure that ivory for which they had risked their lives so
often; broken farmers, upon whom the vicissitudes of the African
pastoralists' existence had fallen heavily; and sour Doppers, whose grim
religious views reminded one of the savage tenets of the Israelites of
old, and who now looked eagerly across the desert for a new land of
Canaan.

With these men, living in wagons and tents, were their wives and
children, and such furniture and worldly gear as they could carry with
them. Around them, scattered over the veldt for miles, grazed the oxen,
horses, sheep, and goats that should accompany the trek. Pigs and
poultry littered the encampment, and were to be seen near ever