Every year or two the good house-mother contributes a baby to the household, and her married daughter or daughter-in-law who may live with her, does so also. And these events serve as a sort of chronological tablet, by appeal to which the exact date of past occurrences can be ascertained and are kept in the family memory. The year of great drought was the year in which Pietje was born; the cows lost so many calves and had foot-and-mouth disease the year that Anna Maria came; Henrik Jacobus was born in the year of the great rain at the end of the long drought; the year when the still-born child arrived was the very year when the great dam was cleaned out and a new wall was put round the cattle kraal; and Willem Johannes Jacobus was born the same year that the patchwork quilt was finished, and Aunt Magdalena came for a visit. And Death comes here. The old grandmother goes from her chair in the corner, and her favourite great-granddaughter inherits her stove; and the stories she used to tell of the old trekking days, and her faint childish memories of the Bovenland where she was born, become matters of tradition; and the little children are carried out often enough from the close rooms of the house, few surviving who were not born very vigorous; and sometimes the great elbow-chair by the coffee-table itself becomes vacant, and the house-mother is carried away by an untoward child-birth, or a "hart-kwaal,"[55] which is generally dropsy as well; her chair is not long left empty; but when the time comes for her husband to be carried out feet foremost, he often asks to be buried beside his first wife; and they sleep peacefully together under the piles of rough iron-stones behind the kopjes. [55] Hart-kwaal = heart-complaint. But the great and exciting event, which takes place once at least in the life of every Boer man and woman, and not infrequently more than once, is marriage. When the maiden is fourteen or fifteen, and the youth sixteen or seventeen, they turn their thoughts towards union. Social and family feeling ordains that with puberty the married life should shortly begin; and this, under the circumstances, perhaps wisely--certainly inevitably.