The duties of the Kitchen Kaffir are multifarious and fairly well performed. He chops the wood, lights the fire, serves at table, cleans the rooms, goes messages, and nurses the baby. He has weaknesses, of course; but these he possesses in common with the rest of the human family. He smokes and snuffs, and is fully alive to the benefits of frequent leisure. At periodic intervals, generally of six months, he shows a strong desire to go home, to _hamba lo kaya_. But this intermittent home-sickness, while the gratifying of it may entail some inconvenience on the _baas_ (master) or the _meesis_, is not an unpleasing feature in the native character. Kraal-life is very patriarchal, and the Kaffirs have strong home-instincts. They are a social race, and the sociality is abundantly visible in the manners and habits of the Kitchen Kaffir. In the ‘Kaffir house’—the outbuilding to be found in the rear of nearly all colonial villas and cottages—there is many a jovial evening spent by the ‘boys.’ When the toil of day is over—few domestic natives work after six or seven o’clock in the evening—they gather together and gossip on the events of the day. They retail all the private life of their masters and mistresses; for they have a wonderful faculty, distinct from prying, of shrewdly finding out everything that is going on. News travels with astonishing speed amongst the native population. The ‘boys’ apparently take it in turn to invite each other to spend the evening and share the porridge supper. Concurrently with the gossiping, they smoke. The pipe is a small bowl fitted into a bullock’s horn, partly filled with water, through which the smoke is drawn. The ‘boys’ generally sit in a circle; and by the light of a stump of candle stuck in a corner, you can see their forms dimly through the stiff clouds which they are blowing. The smoke seems to be continually getting into the Kaffirs’ air-passages, as a loud chorus of coughs is incessantly kept up. So the night wears on. At nine o’clock a bell rings at the police-station, the signal for all Kaffirs to go home. Any native found on the streets after that hour, unless he have a written ‘pass’ from his master, is apprehended and fined half-a-crown.