f of some brazen oven arched overhead. On the farm, day after
day, month after month, the water in the dams fell lower and lower; the
sheep died in the fields; the cattle, scarcely able to crawl, tottered
as they moved from spot to spot in search of food. Week after week,
month after month, the sun looked down from the cloudless sky, till the
karoo-bushes were leafless sticks, broken into the earth, and the earth
itself was naked and bare; and only the milk-bushes, like old hags,
pointed their shrivelled fingers heavenward, praying for the rain that
never came.

*****

It was on an afternoon of a long day in that thirsty summer, that on the
side of the kopje furthest from the homestead the two girls sat. They
were somewhat grown since the days when they played hide-and-seek there,
but they were mere children still.

Their dress was of dark, coarse stuff; their common blue pinafores
reached to their ankles, and on their feet they wore home-made
velschoen.

They sat under a shelving rock, on the surface of which were still
visible some old Bushman paintings, their red and black pigments having
been preserved through long years from wind and rain by the overhanging
ledge; grotesque oxen, elephants, rhinoceroses, and a one-horned beast,
such as no man ever has seen or ever shall.

The girls sat with their backs to the paintings. In their laps were a
few fern and ice-plant leaves, which by dint of much searching they had
gathered under the rocks.

Em took off her big brown kapje and began vigorously to fan her red face
with it; but her companion bent low over the leaves in her lap, and at
last took up an ice-plant leaf and fastened it on to the front of her
blue pinafore with a pin.

"Diamonds must look as these drops do," she said, carefully bending over
the leaf, and crushing one crystal drop with her delicate little nail.
"When I," she said, "am grown up, I shall wear real diamonds, exactly
like these in my hair."

Her companion opened her eyes and wrinkled her low forehead.

"Where will you find them, Lyndall? The stones are only crystals that we
picked up yesterday. Old Otto says so."

"And you think that I am going to stay here always?"

The lip trembled scornfully.

"Ah, no," said her companion. "I suppose some day we shall go somewhere;
but now we are only twelve, and we cannot marry till we are seventeen.
Four years, five--that is a long time to wait. And we might not have
diamonds if we did marry."