hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we
suffered when we were children."

The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense
loneliness, its intense agony.


Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.

At last came the year of the great drought, the year of eighteen-sixty-two.
From end to end of the land the earth cried for water. Man and beast
turned their eyes to the pitiless sky, that like the roof 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.