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On the stoeps of the houses were gathered groups of Dutch women and girls, many of them in deep mourning, and all looking very miserable, gazing at us with unfriendly eyes. Fine-looking but shabbily-clad men were to be met carrying their rifles and bandoliers to the Landrost's late office, now occupied by Colonel Plumer and his Staff.
On the stoeps of some of the houses, groups of women spin or weave cloth for the native sarong; some make deft use of the sewing machine of foreign commerce. The road is fringed by a variety of trees and plants which only a botanist would attempt to describe.
They all stand on stoeps or raised terraces; they are always one-storied and thatched, and owe much of their effect to their gables, their many-paned, teak-framed windows, and their solid teak outside shutters.
You pass neat villas, with pretty gardens and stoeps, gay with flowers, and at the doors of several, neat Malay girls are lounging. They are the best servants here, for the emigrants mostly drink. Then you see a group of children at play, some as black as coals, some brown and very pretty.
After the first commandos had departed the city streets were deserted, and only women and children gathered at the bulletin boards to learn the fate of the burgher armies. The stoeps of houses and cottages were deserted of the bearded yeomanry, and the halls of the Government buildings resounded only with the tread of those who were not old or strong enough to bear arms.
The black-garbed Volksraad members, the officials, and the old retired farmers, who were wont to discuss politics on the stoeps of the capitol and the Transvaal Hotel were absent. Inquiries concerning them could be addressed only to women and children, and the replies invariably were: "They are on commando," or, "They were killed in battle."
The ambitions of Africanderdom were discussed in the broad light of day in the editorial, in the sermon, in the speech, though the details by which those ambitions were to be carried out were only whispered on the Dutch stoeps. Here are the opinions of Reitz, the man who more than all others, save his master, has the blood of the fallen upon his conscience.
They are either white-washed or gaily painted, and in front of each of them are brick terraces called stoeps, where, in the summer, the inhabitants sit and talk to their acquaintances who may be passing. The houses are rather low, there are no regular foot-pavements, the roads are very dusty, and the streets cross each other at right angles.
And yet who can declare that the environment shall not in time exert its inevitable influence on the busy crowding English, and make them or their sons glad to sit upon their stoeps and smoke and look out upon the veldt with a quiet satisfaction which is unuttered and unutterable?
He help the chosen against the children of Hell. "What did Krool do? He tell Oom Paul how the thieves would to come in the night to sold him like sheep to a butcher, how the t'ousand wolves would swarm upon the sheepfold, and there would be no homes for the voortrekker and his vrouw, how the Outlander would sit on our stoeps and pick the peaches from our gardens.
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