e
light goods, groceries, collars, glaring cotton handkerchiefs for
Phoebe's aboriginal domestics, since not every year did she go to Cape
Town, a twenty days' journey by wagon: things dangled from the very
roof; but no hard goods there, if you please, to batter one's head in a
spill. Outside were latticed grooves with tent, tent-poles, and rifles.
Great pieces of cork, and bags of hay and corn, hung dangling from
mighty hooks--the latter to feed the cattle, should they be compelled
to camp out on some sterile spot on the Veldt, and methinks to act
as buffers, should the whole concern roll down a nullah or little
precipice, no very uncommon incident in the blessed region they must
pass to reach Dale's Kloof.

Harness mended; fresh start. The Hottentots and Kafir vociferated and
yelled, and made the unearthly row of a dozen wild beasts wrangling: the
horses drew the bullocks, they the wagon; it crawled and creaked, and
its appendages wobbled finely.

Slowly they creaked and wobbled past apricot hedges and detached houses
and huts, and got into an open country without a tree, but here and
there a stunted camel-thorn. The soil was arid, and grew little food
for man or beast; yet, by a singular freak of nature, it put forth
abundantly things that here at home we find it harder to raise than
homely grass and oats; the ground was thickly clad with flowers of
delightful hues; pyramids of snow or rose-color bordered the track;
yellow and crimson stars bejewelled the ground, and a thousand bulbous
plants burst into all imaginable colors, and spread a rainbow carpet
to the foot of the violet hills; and all this glowed, and gleamed, and
glittered in a sun shining with incredible brightness and purity of
light, but, somehow, without giving a headache or making the air sultry.

Christopher fell to gathering flowers, and interrogating the past by
means of them; for he had studied botany: the past gave him back some
pitiably vague ideas. He sighed. "Never mind," said he to Dick, and
tapped his forehead: "it is here: it is only locked up."

"All right," said Dick; "nothing is lost when you know where 'tis."

"This is a beautiful country," suggested Christopher. "It is all
flowers. It is like the garden of--the garden of--locked up."

"It is de--light--ful," replied the self-compelled optimist sturdily.
But here nature gave way; he was obliged to relieve his agricultural
bile by getting into the cart and complaining to his sister.