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Even the women caught the craze for "higher education" to fit themselves for "kid-glove" professional emoluments; they, too, tore each other's hair, scratched each other's faces in frantic football rushes, tumbling over each other in the wild scrimmage for fees, leaving the kitchens to the ignorant foreigners, who ruined digestions with preposterous cookery, which would have killed a nation of ostriches.
Their pace being much faster than that of the horses, they succeeded in crossing the course pursued by the latter, about three hundred yards in advance of them. Willem and Hendrik hardly taking time to pull up, dismounted and fired. But not with the desired result. The ostriches were at too great a distance, and ran on untouched.
Faith, I was at the end of my imagination, and after with great difficulty making them swallow ostriches for giraffes a god-send, indeed, Negoro! I no longer knew what to invent. Besides, I well saw that my young friend no longer accepted my explanations. Then we fell on elephants' prints. The hippopotami were added to the party.
Thus the Hills had slain sixty-eight lions in and near their farm a tremendous record. Still the beasts continued to come in. My hosts showed me, with considerable pride, their arrangements finally evolved for night protection. The ostriches were confined in a series of heavy corrals, segregating the birds of different ages.
If the younger Gordian collected together bears, elks, zebras, ostriches, boars, and wild horses, he was an imitator only of the spectacles of Carus, in which the rarity of the animals was as much considered as their fierceness.
Both were frequented by great numbers of penguins, the flesh of which served the natives as food, and their skins for cloathing. Their only habitations were caves. The neighbouring continent abounded in ostriches, which they also used as food. The natives of these dreary regions were distinguished into tribes, each having their respective residences.
Widgeon and teal also are said to be in great plenty here in the wet season. To the southward of Bahia there are also ostriches in great plenty, though it is said they are not so large as those of Africa: they are found chiefly in the southern parts of Brazil, especially among the large savannahs near the river of Plate; and from thence further south towards the Straits of Magellan.
A gentleman tells how, during the time of his residence at Podor, a French factory on the banks of the river Niger, there were two ostriches, though young, of gigantic size, which afforded him a very remarkable sight. "They were," he says, "so tame, that two little blacks mounted both together on the back of the largest.
It is certain, however, that these boats are ordinary little river craft, the usual Nile felûkas and gyassas of the time; they are depicted together with emblems of the desert and cultivated land,-ostriches, antelopes, hills, and palm-trees,-and the thoroughly inland and Upper Egyptian character of the whole design springs to the eye.
"He was a long way off from our place," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "We had a little ostrich farm, you know Just a few hundred of 'em, out Johannesburg way." "On the Karroo was it called?" "That's the term. Some of it was freehold though. Luckily. We got along very well in the old days. But there's no ostriches on that farm now."