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Updated: June 29, 2025
She cried and groaned, saying that the old ape might just as well have played his tricks on her mother, who would have said nothing. He made answer to the peasants, who had already raised their hoes to kill him, that he had been compelled to enjoy himself.
Indeed, very shortly we had quite a market established, to which cattle were brought that I bargained for and purchased, giving cloth, knives, hoes, and the usual Kaffir goods in payment for the same. Also, they brought mealies and other corn; and oh! the delight with which those poor people, who for months and months had existed upon nothing but flesh-meat, ate of this farinaceous food.
"We'll see about the service she is on later," replied the officer. "Beat it for the harbor, all of you." When the party reached the Tusks the crew of the schooner was busy unloading long pine boxes which looked as if they contained shovels and hoes, and seemed to be very heavy. The second vessel, the one which had been observed in the north, lay close in.
He found a remedy for his longing by stationing himself so that he could keep a lookout on the fields up there, and see his father when he went out to move the dairy-cows. He taught himself to whittle boats and little rakes and hoes and decorate sticks with patterns cut upon the bark. He was clever with his knife and made diligent use of it.
To one chief they gave "twelve coats of English trucking cloth, twelve alchemy spoons, twelve hatchets, twelve hoes, two dozen of knives, twelve porringers, and four cases of French knives and scissors." To another, "eleven coats of trucking cloth, and one coat of English cloth."
Our tillage is exercised in a large plain or common, some hours walk from our dwellings, and all the neighbours resort thither in a body. They use no beasts of husbandry; and their only instruments are hoes, axes, shovels, and beaks, or pointed iron to dig with. Sometimes we are visited by locusts, which come in large clouds, so as to darken the air, and destroy our harvest.
The native implements are of the rudest kind their hoes little more than sufficient to scratch the ground, and their only other implement a cutlass to cut down the bush. Ploughs are unknown, and spades very little used.
With short-handled hoes the grown people chopped out foot-long strips of plants. Dick and Rose-Ellen followed on hands and knees, and pulled the extra plants from the clumps so that a single strong plant was left every twelve inches. The sun rose higher and hotter in the big blue bowl of sky. Rose-Ellen's ragged dress clung to her, wet with sweat, and her arms and face prickled with heat.
Near the town are several smelting furnaces, from which the natives obtain very good iron. They afterwards hammer the metal into small bars, about a foot in length and two inches in breadth, one of which bars is sufficient to make two Mandingo corn hoes.
It is an unexpected result of my little enterprise, which never aspired to the completeness of the Paris "Jardin des Plantes." Orthodoxy is at a low ebb. Only two clergymen accepted my offer to come and help hoe my potatoes for the privilege of using my vegetable total-depravity figure about the snake-grass, or quack-grass as some call it; and those two did not bring hoes.
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