brought to the door by the best man, who takes the key out of the door, if it have one, and gives it to the bridegroom, who retires, locking the door on the inside; and the dancing is kept up till after daylight, when the guests betake themselves to their carts and wagons and return to their homes, often a day's journey distant. Then the great event of the Boer's life is ended. After a while, it may be he takes his bride home to his father's house. They share a room often with other members of the family, and the girl takes her place as an elder daughter in the household, and, especially if there be no grown daughter, makes coffee, gives out the rations, and attends to the maids. After a while, perhaps, when she has had her first or second child, and the young couple are of an age to take care of themselves, they remove into two small disconnected rooms of their own built on at the end of the farm-house, or a little way off; and it is not uncommon, as sons and daughters grow up, to have three or four of these small dwellings on one farm; though some of the married children almost invariably remain in the large house with the parents. Sometimes, after a few years have passed, the young couple leave the parental home altogether, and become part of the band of trekkers who are ceaselessly moving North in search of new pastures. As the years go by the bride becomes the buxom matron of twenty-five or twenty-six with half-a-dozen children, and she not only has her own coffee table and chair and stove, but, as her eldest daughter soon reaches an age at which she can make coffee, and attend to the active duties of the household, the mother begins to sit sewing permanently in her elbow-chair as her mother and grandmother did before her, and the new generation repeats the story of the old.