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From Capetown to Ladysmith, an Unfinished Record of the South African War
From Capetown to Ladysmith an Unfinished Record of the South African War Author:George Warrington Steevens Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IIL A PASTOR'S POINT OF VIEW. An ideal of Arcady.—Rebel Burghersdorp.—Its monuments. —Dopper theology.—An interview with one of its professors. Burghers... more »dorp, Oct. 14. The village lies compact and clean-cut, a dot in the wilderness. No fields or orchards break the transition from man to nature; step out of the street and you are at once on rock-ribbed kopje or raw veldt. As you stand on one of the bare lines of hill that squeeze it into a narrow valley, Burghersdorp is a chequer-board of white house, green tree, and grey iron roof; beyond its edges everything is the changeless yellow brown of South African landscape. Go down into the streets, and Burghersdorpis an ideal of Arcady. The broad, dusty, un- metalled 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 thebordering 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 Burghe...« less