South Africa -- Description and travel; South Africa -- History -- 1836-1909; South Africa -- History -- To 1836
Potchefstroom may probably contain something over 2,000 white
inhabitants. In saying this, however, I have nothing but guess work to
guide me. It is a town covering a very large area, with streets nearly a
mile in length;--but here again there is a great deficiency of houses.
In some of those streets a wanderer might fancy himself to be roaming
through some remote green lane in England, overshadowed through its
whole length by weeping willows. The road way under his feet will be
exactly that of a green lane;--here a rut, and there a meandering path
worn by children’s feet, and grass around him everywhere. Now and again
he will come across a cottage,--hardly more than a cabin,--with half a
dozen dirty children at the door. Such are the back streets at
Potchefstroom. And here too, as at Pretoria, there are hedges of roses,
long rows of crowded rose-bushes round the little houses of the better
class. There are spots so picturesque as almost to make the wanderer
fancy that it would be pleasant to live in a place so pretty, so
retired, and so quiet. But weeping willows and rose hedges would, I
fear, after a time become insufficient, and the wanderer who had chosen
to sojourn here under the influence of these attractions, might wish
himself back in some busier centre of the world’s business.
Here also there is a great square in the centre of the town, with the
Dutch church in the midst of it,--by no means so ugly as the church at
Pretoria. The square is larger and very much more picturesque,--while
the sardine boxes and paper shirt-collars, so ubiquitous at the newer
town, are less obtrusive. The square when I was there was green with
grass on which horses were grazing, and here and there were stationed
the huge waggons of travellers who had “spanned out” their oxen and were
resting here under the tent coverings erected on their vehicles. The
scene as I saw it would have made an exquisite subject for a Dutch
landscape painter, and was especially Dutch in all its details.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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