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Supposing that we Boers had taken London and other large towns, and had driven the English people before us and compelled them to hide in the mountains with nothing upon which to subsist but mealie pap and meat without salt, with only worn and rent clothes as a covering, their houses burnt, and their women and children placed in Concentration Camps in the hands of the enemy.
"At last the crisis came. One Saturday night I had paid the men as usual, and bought a muid of mealie meal at sixty shillings for them to fill themselves with, and then I went with my boy Harry and sat on the edge of the great hole that we had dug in the hill-side, and which we had in bitter mockery named Eldorado.
To-day soldiers greeted each other with a cheery "'Ave you 'eard the noos? They say there'll be full rations to-day." An extra half-pound of meat, five biscuits instead of one and a quarter, and a few additional ounces of mealie meal, were more to them at that moment than a British victory. February 23.
Above her head myriads of locusts floated in a darkening mass. The mealie stalks were only a foot or so high, but the locusts knew that they were green, and therefore good to eat, so they hovered around. The mealies were in rows, and between these rows galloped half-a-dozen horses carrying half-a-dozen very raw natives.
"'By George! said Master Harry; 'I say, father, you and I shall have to let ourselves out to work with the Kaffirs and live on mealie pap, and he sniggered at his unpleasant little joke.
After an hour or so, supper was put upon the table, consisting of a bowl full of boiled bones, a small stack of mealie cobs, and, be it added, some good bread-and-butter. The eating arrangements of these people are certainly very trying.
"Yes; our horses all get two feeds of mealies a day, or, when it is wet, one feed of mealies and a hot mash made of mealie flour, besides what they can pick up, for we don't draw horse rations. Now, sir, we will be off;" and he gave the word "Mount!" The lads all in a second swung into their saddles. "Good-bye, lads, and good luck!"
A German farmhouse was an oasis of plenty amid a very hungry army. It made us sometimes wonder whether it was quite right to leave German ducks and fowls and sheep behind us, when we had to live on mealie meal and tough trek-ox. But the women were so terrified, at first, that we gave such farms a wide berth when scarcity of water did not force us to camp within the enclosures.
Doubtless if those lawyers of whom the Lord speaks hard things in the Testament were set side by side with the lawyers who draw mortgage bonds and practise usury here in South Africa, they would prove to be as like to each other as are the grains of corn upon one mealie cob. Yes, when, all dressed the same, they stand together among the goats on the last day few indeed will know them apart.
If he's making war on his neighbour on one side, he has no room left to think of guarding his prisoners on the other. "To-night," Guy said, one evening, as they sat together in their hut, over their native supper of mealie cakes and springbok venison, "we must make a bold stroke. We must creep out of the kraal as well as we can, and go for the sea westward, through Namaqua land to Angra Pequena."
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