their feet, which they
must have done, had they moved about outside where the ground was
thickly covered.

Many of the insects even crawled inside, through the chinks of the door
and windows, and greedily devoured any vegetable substance which
happened to be lying about the floor.

At the end of two hours Von Bloom looked forth. The thickest of the
flight had passed. The sun was again shining; but upon what was he
shining? No longer upon green fields and a flowery garden. No. Around
the house, on every side, north, south, east, and west, the eye rested
only on black desolation. Not a blade of grass, not a leaf could be
seen--even the very bark was stripped from the trees, that now stood as
if withered by the hand of God! Had fire swept the surface, it could not
have left it more naked and desolate. There was no garden, there were no
fields of maize or buckwheat, there was no longer a farm--the kraal
stood in the midst of a desert!

Words cannot depict the emotions of the field-cornet at that moment. The
pen cannot describe his painful feelings.

Such a change in two hours! He could scarce credit his senses--he could
scarce believe in its reality. He knew that the locusts would eat up his
maize, and his wheat, and the vegetables of his garden; but his fancy
had fallen far short of the extreme desolation that had actually been
produced. The whole landscape was metamorphosed--grass was out of the
question--trees, whose delicate foliage had played in the soft breeze
but two short hours before, now stood leafless, scathed by worse than
winter. The very ground seemed altered in shape! He would not have known
it as his own farm. Most certainly had the owner been absent during the
period of the locust-flight, and approached without any information of
what had been passing, he would not have recognised the place of his own
habitation!

With the phlegm peculiar to his race, the field-cornet sat down, and
remained for a long time without speech or movement.

His children gathered near, and looked on--their young hearts painfully
throbbing. They could not fully appreciate the difficult circumstances
in which this occurrence had placed them; nor did their father himself
at first. He thought only of the loss he had sustained, in the
destruction of his fine crops; and this of itself, when we consider his
isolated situation, and the hopelessness of restoring them, was enough
to cause him very great chagrin.

"Gone! all gone!"