the want of means of conveyance (for
there are no cabs, and very few _remises_) and good food and attendance,
any one wanting to entertain would almost need to build a house, so
impossible is it to collect more than half a dozen people inside an
ordinary-sized house here. For my part, my verandah is the comfort of my
life. When more than four or five people at a time chance to come to
afternoon tea, we overflow into the verandah. It runs round three sides
of the four rooms called a house, and is at once my day-nursery, my
lumber-room, my summer-parlor, my place of exercise--everything, in
fact. And it is an incessant occupation to train the creepers and wage
war against the legions of brilliantly-colored grasshoppers which infest
and devour the honeysuckles and roses. Never was there such a place for
insects! They eat up everything in the kitchen-garden, devour every leaf
off my peach and orange trees, scarring and spoiling the fruit as well.
It is no comfort whatever that they are wonderfully beautiful
creatures, striped and ringed with a thousand colors in a thousand
various ways: one has only to see the riddled appearance of every leaf
and flower to harden one's heart. Just now they have cleared off every
blossom out of the garden except my zinnias, which grow magnificently
and make the devastated flower-bed still gay with every hue and tint a
zinnia can put on--salmon-color, rose, scarlet, pink, maroon, and fifty
shades besides. On the veldt too the flowers have passed by, but their
place is taken by the grasses, which are all in seed. People say the
grass is rank and poor, and of not much account as food for stock, but
it has an astonishing variety of beautiful seeds. In one patch it is
like miniature pampas-grass, only a couple of inches long each seed-pod,
but white and fluffy. Again, there will be tall stems laden with rich
purple grains or delicate tufts of rose-colored seed. One of the
prettiest, however, is like wee green harebells hanging all down a tall
and slender stalk, and hiding within their cups the seed. Unfortunately,
the weeds and burs seed just as freely, and there is one especial
torment to the garden in the shape of an innocent-looking little plant
something like an alpine strawberry in leaf and blossom, bearing a most
aggravating tuft of little black spines which lose no opportunity of
sticking to one's petticoats in myriads. They are familiarly known as
"blackjacks," and can hold their own as pes