My nigger slops along through the slush and tells me that my lunch is ready. He is not a happy-looking nigger by any means. A white man looks bad enough in the mud and cold, but a nigger presents a pitiful spectacle. His face goes whitish green, with an undercurrent of slatey grey running through it. The brilliancy leaves the coal-black eyes, and they become as lifeless and limp as a professional politician at a prayer meeting. The mouth goes agape, the thick lips become flabby, and fall away from the teeth. The mouth does not seem to fit the face, but hangs on to it like a second-hand suit on a backyard fence. My nigger is no better, and no worse, than the rest of them. He looks like a chapter in Lamentations, and is about as much at home in the sodden camp as a bar of wet soap in a sand heap. Just now he is good for nothing except to sing doleful hymns in a key sad enough to frighten a transit mule away from a bag of mealies. When he is not singing sadly he is quoting Scripture and thinking about his immortal soul. When the sun comes out to-morrow and the day after, he will be dancing a most unholy dance or be making love to "Dinah," filling in the intervals by cursing in three different languages stray horses that steal our fodder. It is really astonishing what a difference the weather makes to the morals of the South African nigger. Give him plenty of sunshine, and he forgets he ever had a soul, and throws slabs of blasphemy, picked up from the Tommies around him, with painful liberality. When he gets tired of English oaths, he drops into Cape Dutch, and some of the curses contained in that language are solid enough to hurt anything they hit. Later on he drifts into his native tongue, raises his voice a couple of octaves, and streaks the atmosphere with multi-coloured oaths, until you imagine you are listening to a vocal rainbow. But take away the sunshine, give him a wet hide and a wet floor to camp on, and he straightway becomes all penitence and prayer. His face, peering out dismally between the upturned collar of his weather-stained coat and the down-drawn brim of his battered hat, looks like a soiled sermon, and he is altogether woeful.