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118 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
ing
on the uncertain pasture lands of the veld. Here his children grew up
about him with little more care than the goats that browsed on the
kopjes.
A
poor farmer's home was a squalid hovel. It was roughly partitioned to
form a bedroom and kitchen, lighted by two small windows smudged with
grime. Dirty calico tacked on the rafters made its ceiling. Its bare
earthen floor was smeared weekly with a polishing paste of cowdung and
water. Father, mother, and children slept together on a rude frame
overlaced with rawhide strips. The only other furniture in this
stifling bedroom was a chest of drawers and a small cracked mirror.
There was no washbowl or water pitcher, but in the morning one after
another of the family wiped their faces and swabbed their hands on the
same moistened cloth. Then they drew up chairs with rawhide seats to a
rough wooden table and ate corn meal porridge, and sometimes a hunk of
tough mutton boiled with rice, and soaked their coarse unbolted wheat
flour bread in a gritty, black coffee syrup.1
When
the sheep and goats were turned out of the kraal to graze on the
patches of grass and the stunted thorns of the veld, the children ran
away after them and roamed over the pasture land all day long like the
flocks. There was no daily round of work for them. The black servants
were the shepherds of the flocks, and did the slovenly housework, under
the indolent eye of the Boer and his vrouw, for the poorest farmer
would not work with his own hands except at a pinch. His boys and girls
had never seen a doll or a toy of any kind, but the instinct of
childhood will find playthings on the face of the most barren karroo,
and the Jacobs children were luckily close to the edge of a river which
was strewn with uncommonly beautiful pebbles, mixed with coarser gravel.
Here
were garnets with their rich carmine flush, the fainter rose of the
carnelian, the bronze of jasper, the thick cream of chalcedony, heaps
of agates of motley hues, and many shining
1 " Life with the Boers in the Orange Free State," bv a resident English physician's wife, New York, 1899.
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