Next morning we resumed our journey, and after five hours' trek, made
most enjoyable by the mode of travelling and the rugged beauty of the
scenery, we arrived at "Grasslands," the home of our friends. The house
was of one-storey, well built and roomy, and being on a rise, commanded
a fine view of the wild, uninhabited surrounding country. Our host was
a handsome, high-spirited Englishman, with a little English child-wife,
a dainty little piece of humanity.
As the young wife leaned against the veranda talking to us in her pink
calico dress, broad-brimmed straw hat trimmed with a bit of lace, and a
spray of jessamine she had pulled from the vine covering the front of
the house, she did not look much like one to live where wild monkeys
chatter in the trees, and savage beasts come within rifle range of the
front door.
Our friend was engaged in ostrich-farming, and many of these
queer-looking bipeds, with their long necks and floating feathers, the
beauty of which is certainly wasted on their own backs, were wandering
around the house. It had been an addition to our stock of information
to learn in the Cape Colony that ostrich feathers were as much the
product of regulated human labour as wool, mohair, or silk. We had
always supposed ostrich feathers to be procured by hunters, and had in
mind stories of their tactics in the chase of the fleet-footed bird. We
learned that Cape farmers buy and sell ostriches as they do sheep, and
fence their flock in, stable them, and grow crops for them. The eggs
are not yet considered as belonging to the Cape dairy, and are not sent
to market with bread and cheese. They are too precious for consumption,
and too valuable even to be left for hatching to the rude methods of
nature. The act of laying has not yet been dispensed with, but as soon
as the eggs have been laid the nest is discarded, the parents are
"locked out," and the mechanical certainties of the incubator are
substituted for parental instinct and affection. We were glad to learn,
for the sake of our cherished traditions, that this farming was only of
comparatively recent date, a domesticated ostrich being fifteen or
twenty years ago unknown. There are now 150,000 of these domesticated
birds in the Cape Colony, giving employment to not less than 8,000,000
dollars capital.
Our host informed us that the rearing of ostriches was an extremely
difficult operation, as the bird itself, although devouring everything
that comes in its way, from a steel fork to a lemon, is very delicate,
and liable to injury in all sorts of ways. They are housed at night in
circular kraals, surrounded by a low rush fence, the ostrich, despite
his fleetness and strength of legs, being unable to mount or jump over
any obstacle, and turned out during the day into the veldt in charge of
a herd.
An ostrich can give a mighty kick, sufficient to break a man's leg, but
you may easily choke him by throwing your arms around his neck. The
bird can then do nothing, for he has no strength in his wings to beat
his enemy off, and is only able to use his formidable legs, like a
horse, backward. Still, he is an awkward enemy to engage, for it
requires some courage to rush up to a bird and embrace him until help
arrives, or until you succeed in choking him. Despite the strength of
his legs they are easily broken if the bird accidentally strikes them
against any obstruction, such as a hanging bramble or a wire fence. He
must be carefully watched to prevent such accidents, and it is also
necessary to drive him away from any food likely to disagree with him.
The feathers are sometimes plucked, and sometimes separated from the
body by a sharp curved knife, each feather being taken separately. To
do this the fanner drives them into a small inclosure, where there is
little room to move about, and insinuates himself in among them,
selecting such feathers as have arrived at maturity, and leaving the
others to grow. The bird has a fresh crop of feathers every year, and
as the prime feathers are very valuable, it may easily be believed that
a lucky breeder finds the occupation a very profitable one.
The prettiest sight to see on an ostrich farm is the nursery, where, in
a large room, in inclement weather, a score or more of little chicks are
attended by a black boy, whom they follow everywhere.
Many farmers are unfortunate and meet with accidents, and thus lose
heavily. Sometimes the soil is unfitted to grow the herbage necessary
for the ostriches' food, and there are many accidents they are liable
to, such as dangers from prowling jackals or from severe storms. Then
there are tigers and vultures to be guarded against. It will thus be
seen that the ostrich farmer's life is not necessarily a happy one. Our
stay at Grasslands was made very pleasant by Mr M--and his wife. What
with picnics in the wild surrounding country day after day, musical
evenings on the moonlit lawn, a week passed away before we knew it.
It was here we noticed Frank had something on her mind which she wished
to communicate to us. We said nothing to assist her, although we had a
strong suspicion of what was coming. One morning she began: "Well, I
want to tell you something." She didn't get any further, for we
interrupted with "Oh, we know; you are going to marry Mr A--, whom you
met on the diamond fields last year, and we are to dance at the wedding.
Didn't you think any one suspected? Why, my dear, it was very plain to
us that he was to be your future husband long before you thought so
yourself!" After we had congratulated her, we inquired how soon the
event was to take place. She proposed having the wedding from the
cathedral at Grahamstown, as we had many warm friends living there. So
the matter was settled for the time being.
One evening a musical friend of our host, a gentleman from Port
Elizabeth, and a violinist of no mean order, joined our circle, and we
sat for hours listening to his music. After treating us to some choice
selections, he began to play some of the songs of the farm Kafirs, who
were listening about in numbers. They had learned to sing at their
Sunday-schools in the town such hymns as "Hold the Fort," etc, and took
up the airs and began to sing, after their manner, in a chanting drone.
Soon the sound of their own voices and the strains of the violin wrought
them up to a high pitch of excitement, and they began to walk around us
in a circle, keeping time with their hands, feet and head. Before long
the musician, who had a touch of the grotesque in his humour, placed
himself at the head of the procession. The music grew faster and
faster, and the monotonous tramp of the Kafirs quickened gradually into
a wild war dance. The scene which followed baffles description; there
was the musician scraping away like an infernal Paganini, producing
tones from his fiddle that seemed to excite the Kafirs to a pitch of
frenzy. We joined in the singing, and sang at the top of our voices,
while the black men, dancing, whirling, shouting, and gesticulating,
grew wilder and wilder in their antics. The music suddenly ceasing,
they sank exhausted to the ground. It was a weird scene in the
moonlight, and one we shall long remember.
Our stay at Grasslands came to an end all too soon, and we looked long
and lingeringly at familiar objects as we were driven back to town in
Mr M--'s handsome Cape cart behind a dashing span of horses.