brown of South African landscape.

Go down into the streets, and Burghersdorp is an ideal of Arcady. The
broad, dusty, unmetalled roads are steeped in sunshine. The houses are
all one-storeyed, some brick, some mud, some the eternal corrugated
iron, most faced with whitewash, many fronted with shady verandahs. As
blinds against the sun they have lattices of trees down every
street--white-blossoming laburnum, poplars, sycamores.

Despite verandahs and trees, the sunshine soaks down into every
corner--genially, languorously warm. All Burghersdorp basks. You see
half-a-dozen yoke of bullocks with a waggon, standing placidly in the
street, too lazy even to swish their tails against the flies; pass by an
hour later, and they are still there, and the black man lounging by the
leaders has hardly shifted one leg; pass by at evening, and they have
moved on three hundred yards, and are resting again. In the daytime hens
peck and cackle in every street; at nightfall the bordering veldt hums
with crickets and bullfrogs. At morn come a flight of locusts--first,
yellow-white scouts whirring down every street, then a pelting
snowstorm of them high up over the houses, spangling the blue heaven.
But Burghersdorp cared nothing. "There is nothing for them," said a
farmer, with cosy satisfaction; "the frost killed everything last week."

British and Dutch salute and exchange the news with lazy mutual
tolerance. The British are storekeepers and men of business; the Boers
ride in from their farms. They are big, bearded men, loose of limb,
shabbily dressed in broad-brimmed hats, corduroy trousers, and brown
shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter erect and easy;
unkempt, rough, half-savage, their tanned faces and blue eyes express
lazy good-nature, sluggish stubbornness, dormant fierceness. They ask