I have been told of a certain farmer who ploughed, sowed and reaped his lands with the aid of four girls; while one tended the sheep, one the oxen, one led, and one drove the span of oxen pulling the waggon. And thus he had to do all his work with only the assistance of his daughters. He had been blessed with a troop of girls, and not one boy. And as to native labour, since the gold mines are offering such high wages, the poor farmer must consider himself lucky if he can get any at all; while many cannot afford to pay a price sufficiently high to keep their boys from going off to the gold mines. Thus it is that we see so many ill-figured Boer girls. But for all that, I do believe that amongst the Boer women are to be found some as handsome as any in the world. The faint attempt at a description of Lettie is not drawn from the imagination, but is exactly as she was known to the writer. It was amongst this family that our party of hunters now found themselves. As I have said, they were welcomed most heartily, their horses were soon stabled and themselves led into the house and refreshed with coffee and cake. Oom Ignatious, not having had the luck as yet to sell a gold farm, had to content himself with a moderate-sized farmhouse of the old Dutch style, mainly built by himself and friends. It consisted of a dining-room, hall and sitting-room combined (nothing unusual), three bedrooms--one bedroom for the old people, one for Lettie, and one for the boys--and a kitchen--five altogether. Oom Ignatious’s wealth consisted of his oxen and sheep and in what he managed to raise from his lands, on all of which he contrived to live comfortably without any waste or want, but without having much surplus over at the end of the year. When Oom Ignatious heard that they were out for the purpose of killing something, he told Ignatious, junior, and Daniel to leave the work they were at and show them the haunts of certain _oribe_ and steenbuck that they knew of. Our party of greenhorns failed to bag anything in spite of repeated attempts. The young Boers showed them buck after buck quietly grazing in the long grass, but, standing or running, our young friends missed every shot. At last Keith said, ‘These young fellows are laughing at us, the bucks are too far away, you can’t hit them at such a distance.’ The young Boers, who knew a few words of English, understood this, but said never a word, and kept on making themselves as agreeable as possible to Keith with their scant knowledge of English. At last, they were on their homeward way, no game in their bags, when suddenly Ignatious pulled Keith by the arm, enjoined silence, and pointed to a distant rise in the level plain and said,-- ‘Do you see that _oribe_ lying there against the butt?’ ‘Where? I do not see anything but grass.’ ‘There, don’t you see where I am pointing?’ ‘No, old chappie, you do not come it over me, there is nothing there.’