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Updated: May 2, 2025
Soon after the brown pony was cantering along the footpath to the daub-and-wattle house, and his master as he rode whistled John Speriwig and the Thorn Kloof Schottische.
Even before the feint sputtered out the rush had been made, the stratagem had developed, and at the bidding of twenty incendiary torches, the daub-and-wattle huts of the Barala town leaped skyward in one roaring conflagration. We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that day of fire and blood.
On the credit sheet were marked four hundred and eight British soldiers, seven cannon, one hundred and fifty waggons, five hundred and fifty rifles, two thousand horses and cattle, and vast stores of ammunition and provisions captured during the day. In among the north-eastern hills, where a farmer's daub-and-wattle cottage stood, were the prisoners of war, chatting and joking with their captors.
He clinched his fist tight to think of some good idea he might express to her; but of all those profound things he had pictured himself as saying to her, when he sat alone in the daub-and-wattle house, not one came. He said, at last: "These Boer dances are very low things;" and then, as soon as it had gone from him, he thought it was not a clever remark, and wished it back.
In the village dwell several hundred souls, almost entirely the officers and soldiers and their families. There is one long street. The one-story, daub-and-wattle houses have low eaves and steep sloping roofs of palm-leaves or of split palm-trunks. Under one or two old but small trees there are rude benches; and for a part of the length of the street there is a rough stone sidewalk.
There was a child in the tavern on the veld; it lay in an old orange-box, half-filled with shavings, covered with a thin, worn blanket, in the daub-and-wattle outhouse, where the Hottentot woman, called the chambermaid, and the Kaffir woman, who was cook, slept together on one filthy pallet.
I am dead sleepy," she added; "the stupid thing doesn't know how to talk love-talk at all," and she climbed into the four-poster, clothes and all, and drew the quilt up to her chin. On the day preceding Tant Sannie's wedding, Gregory Rose sat in the blazing sun on the stone wall behind his daub-and-wattle house.
In the afternoon of the day following our arrival there was a heavy rain-storm which drove into the unglazed windows, and here and there came through the roof and walls of our daub-and-wattle house. The heat was intense and there was much moisture in this valley.
The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof of the bald stable for the waggon oxen all was as crude and ugly as a new country can make things.
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 square daub-and-wattle building, far out in the karoo, two miles from the homestead. It was covered outside with a sombre coating of brown mud, two little panes being let into the walls for windows.
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