United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the High Street of Lyndhurst the wayfarers had to pick their way, for the little town was crowded with the guardsmen, grooms, and yeomen prickers who were attached to the King's hunt. The King himself was staying at Castle Malwood, but several of his suite had been compelled to seek such quarters as they might find in the wooden or wattle-and-daub cottages of the village.
Six of these square structures built of "wattle-and-daub" and roofed with thatch, the largest of them measuring about twenty feet by twelve, and about seven feet high to the overhanging eaves were built in a row, with spaces of about six feet between them; while the seventh, which I rightly conjectured to be the itunkulu, or King's House, stood about twelve feet in front of the others, and was about the same size as the largest of them.
And now after passing Holmesley Walk and the Wooton Heath, the forest began to shred out into scattered belts of trees, with gleam of corn-field and stretch of pasture-land between. Here and there by the wayside stood little knots of wattle-and-daub huts with shock-haired laborers lounging by the doors and red-cheeked children sprawling in the roadway.
A wattle-and-daub building was put up as a police-office, on the site of the Western Markets, where it did duty for some time, until one night it fell; some say because it was undermined by a party of imprisoned natives; but others, because a bull belonging to Mr. Batman had rushed against it. A court-house was erected, and four policemen appointed.
And there is a spark of it in the soul of every woman waging her solitary fight on the outposts of the Empire, whether she put new life and hope and spirit into a miner's cabin, or a farmer's little wattle-and-daub home, or in the heart of any servant of the Empire.
With crossed ankles and sunken head, he sat as though all his life had passed out of him, with the beads slipping slowly through his thin, yellow fingers. Behind him lay the narrow cell, clay-floored and damp, comfortless, profitless and sordid. Beyond it there lay amid the trees the wattle-and-daub hut of a laborer, the door open, and the single room exposed to the view.
Men died, and women and children, the baron of the castle, the franklin on the farm, the monk in the abbey and the villein in his wattle-and-daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted reek and all died the same death of corruption. Of those who were stricken none recovered, and the illness was ever the same gross boils, raving, and the black blotches which gave its name to the disease.
At the door of a moderately handsome residence which had succeeded the wattle-and-daub style of thing I was heartily welcomed by my friend and his amiable spouse. Here I had the pleasure of enjoying a South African picnic. A picnic is at all times interesting, doubly so when undertaken in peculiar circumstances.
Its summit was crowned by the covered grave of some old Kaffir chief a rude cairn of big stones under a thatched awning. At the foot of this jagged and cleft rock the farmhouse nestled four square walls of wattle-and-daub, sheltered by its mass from the sweeping winds of the South African plateau.
Word Of The Day