After breakfast he makes his plans for the day’s work, which may consist of a forward "trek" or a hunting trip. He attends to the little plot of cultivated ground, which provides all the vegetables and grain for the table, and spends the remainder of the day in attending to the cattle and sheep. Toward night he gathers his family around him, and reads to them selected chapters from the Bible. From the same book he teaches his children to read until twilight is ended, whereupon the Boer’s day is ended, and he seeks his bed. During the dry season the programme varies only as far as his place of abode is concerned. With the arrival of that season the Boer closes his house and becomes a wanderer in pursuit of water. The sheep and cattle are driven to the rivers, and the family follows in big transport wagons, not unlike the American prairie-schooner, propelled by eight spans of oxen. The family moves from place to place as the necessity for new pasturage arises. With the approach of the wet season the nomads prepare for the return to the deserted homestead, and, as soon as the first rain has fallen and the grass has changed the colour of the landscape, the Boer and his vast herds are homeward bound. The Boer homestead is as unpretentious as its owner. Generally it is a low, one-story stone structure, with a steep tile roof and a small annex in the rear, which is used as a kitchen. The door is on a level with the ground, and four windows afford all the light that is required in the four square rooms in the interior. A dining room and three bedrooms suffice for a family, however large. The floors are of hardened clay, liberally coated with manure, which is designed to ward off the pestiferous insects that swarm over the plains. The house is usually situated in a valley and close to a stream, and, in rare instances, is sheltered by a few trees that have been brought from the coast country. Native trees are such a rarity that the traveller may go five hundred miles without seeing a single specimen. The Boer vrouw feels no need of firewood, however, for her ancestors taught her to cook her meals over a fire of the dry product of the cattle-decked plains. Personal uncleanliness is one of the great failings that has been attributed to the Boer, but when it is taken into consideration that water is a priceless possession on the plains of South Africa, no further explanation is needed. The canard that the Boers go to bed without undressing is as absurd as the one of like origin that an entire family sleeps in one bed. Yet these fictions constantly appear, and frequently over the names of persons who have penetrated into South Africa no farther than Cape Town.