Note 51 — Chapter IV · THE WANDERINGS OF THE BOER

Travelling in the north of the Colony along the banks of the Orange in our childhood, we were once compelled to pass the night in the house of a very wealthy farmer. At bedtime we were shown into a room with three bedsteads. In one slept the father, mother, and the young infant, in another the grandmother and two of the younger children; in a large four-poster in the other corner were two girls of fourteen and sixteen and a youth of nineteen. On this bed we were asked to lie down, and about one o'clock our company was added to by a huge Boer bull-dog, which lay at the foot, and successfully, even for a child, prevented sleep.