The household are taking their midday siesta, and the green wooden shutters and door are closed. But, as one dismounts, from behind the brick oven at the back one sees a little white and sandy head appear, and a little shoeless or vel-schoened urchin, who has escaped from the embargo of the midday siesta to play secretly in the sun, rushes into the house by the back-door, and raises the cry of "Mense!" (people). When we have dismounted and hooked our horse to a rail or the post on which a carpenter's vice is fastened, and are preparing to mount the little stone platform running along the whole front of the house, the upper half of the door opens slowly, and the Boer's head looks out over it, his eyes still dreamy with midday sleep. If we are folk of respectable appearance, unmistakably white and mounted, he will open the lower half of the door and come out in his shirt and tan-cord trousers, and shake hands quietly, and having asked a few questions, will invite us to off-saddle. And when we have removed the saddles from our horses, and, having first securely knee-haltered them, turned them loose to feed on the bushes, and replied to our host's inquiries as to our names, our business, and other small details, we follow him into the house. The door is divided into two parts, partly because the upper half being left open, it admits all the air, and sometimes, if there be no window, all the light that gains accession to the front room--the windows being so made that they cannot open--and partly because the lower half, when closed, serves to keep the children in, and to keep the fowls and dogs out. When we enter we find the front room of large size as compared to the whole building, and we are asked to take a seat on one of the chairs or the sofa, whose seats are composed of thongs of dried ox-hide skilfully interlaced. The floor of the room is of hardened mud, worn here and there into inequalities by the tramping of feet; the walls are white-washed, and from the rafters or against the wall are rests for a couple of guns. In the centre of the room is a square table, often with unturned legs of some Colonial wood, and generally of African contrivance; on one side of the room, opposite the wooden sofa, and made of the same curious old wood, stands a little square table, generally with a coffee-urn upon it, and sometimes a little work-box or a large family Bible; beside it is invariably an elbow-chair of the same make as the sofa, and with a seat of the same interlaced leather thongs; before the elbow-chair stands a little square wooden stove, such as you may see exactly portrayed in many an old Flemish picture of the seventeenth century--a little solid wooden box with a hole at one side, into which a brazier of live coals may be put, the top carved out into holes of a fanciful pattern, through which the heat may rise to the feet of the person using it. Soon the door of the side room opens, and the mistress of