The Story of an African Farm

Slowly over the flat came a cart. On the back seat sat Gregory, his arms folded, his hat drawn over his eyes. A Kaffer boy sat on the front seat driving, and at his feet sat Dos...

Waldo lay on his stomach on the red sand. The small ostriches he herded wandered about him, pecking at the food he had cut, or at pebbles and dry sticks. On his right lay the gr...

They say that in the world to come time is not measured out by months and years. Neither is it here. The soul’s life has seasons of its own; periods not found in any calendar, t...

She was more like a princess, yes, far more like a princess, than the lady who still hung on the wall in Tant Sannie’s bedroom. So Em thought. She leaned back in the little armc...

The August night-wind, weird and shrill, howled round the chimneys and through the crannies, and in walls and doors, and uttered a long low cry as it forced its way among the cl...

“Of course I do! It’s enough to break the horses’ necks, and knock one up for the whole day besides,” he added testily; then twisted his head to look at the buggy that came on b...

Bonaparte Blenkins was riding home on the grey mare. He had ridden out that afternoon, partly for the benefit of his health, partly to maintain his character as overseer of the...

At four o’clock the next afternoon the German rode across the plain, returning from his search for the lost sheep. He rode slowly, for he had been in the saddle since sunrise an...

It had been a princely day. The long morning had melted slowly into a rich afternoon. Rains had covered the karoo with a heavy coat of green that hid the red earth everywhere. I...

The new man, Gregory Rose, sat at the door of his dwelling, his arms folded, his legs crossed, and a profound melancholy seeming to rest over his soul. His house was a little sq...

Em, who was in the storeroom measuring the Kaffer’s rations, looked up and saw her former lover standing betwixt her and the sunshine. For some days after that evening on which...

The boy Waldo kissed the pages of his book and looked up. Far over the flat lay the kopje, a mere speck; the sheep wandered quietly from bush to bush; the stillness of the early...

A fire is burning in the unused hearth of the cabin. The fuel blazes up, and lights the black rafters, and warms the faded red lions on the quilt, and fills the little room with...

The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted karoo bushes a few inches high, the...

Bonaparte Blenkins sat on the side of the bed. He had wonderfully revived since the day before, held his head high, talked in a full sonorous voice, and ate greedily of all the...

It was just after sunset, and Lyndall had not yet returned from her first driving-lesson, when the lean coloured woman standing at the corner of the house to enjoy the evening b...

The wagon came on slowly. Waldo laid curled among the sacks at the back of the wagon, the hand in his breast resting on the sheep-shearing machine. It was finished now. The righ...

“I have found something in the loft,” said Em to Waldo, who was listlessly piling cakes of fuel on the kraal wall, a week after. “It is a box of books that belonged to my father...

For, ever from the earliest childhood to the latest age, day by day, and step by step, the busy waking life is followed and reflected by the life of dreams--waking dreams, sleep...

On the doorstep stood the Boer-woman, a hand on each hip, her face red and fiery, her head nodding fiercely. At her feet sat the yellow Hottentot maid, her satellite, and around...

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 pitiles...

“Here,” said Tant Sannie to her Hottentot maid, “I have been in this house four years, and never been up in the loft. Fatter women than I go up ladders; I will go up today and s...

“Ah, what is the matter?” asked Waldo, stopping at the foot of the ladder with a load of skins on his back that he was carrying up to the loft. Through the open door in the gabl...

“May I come in? I hope I do not disturb you, my dear friend,” said Bonaparte, late one evening, putting his nose in at the cabin door, where the German and his son sat finishing...

Gregory Rose was in the loft putting it neat. Outside the rain poured; a six months’ drought had broken, and the thirsty plain was drenched with water. What it could not swallow...

At nine o’clock in the evening, packing his bundles for the next morning’s start, Waldo looked up, and was surprised to see Em’s yellow head peeping in at his door. It was many...

Doss sat among the karoo bushes, one yellow ear drawn over his wicked little eye, ready to flap away any adventurous fly that might settle on his nose. Around him in the morning...