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Seven Years in South Africa.

before, was a type of this class; his farm had a circumference of many miles, although he did not cultivate a thirty-sixth part of it. To provide himself with labourers, he had obtained the ownership of a district where the harvest had been lost through drought, and had found the residents only too glad to leave their homes on the Caledon River, and to migrate to more favourable quarters.

One very marked ethnographical distinction exists between the tribes of the Basutos and the Korannas in the way they build their huts; those of the Basutos being made of boughs in a cylindrical form, about three feet in diameter, and protected by conical roofs of reeds and dry grass, while the Korannas usually adopt the form of a hemisphere, and construct them of dead branches loosely covered with mats.

We had the honour of being surveyed by one of the black ladies; she wore nothing but a short petticoat of grey calico, and her forehead, cheeks, and breasts were tattooed in dark-blue ochre with a complication of wavy lines. She only looked at us from the boundary of her own domain.

Outside one of the Koranna huts my attention was caught by a man shabbily dressed in European costume, towards whom an old woman, also in dirty European dress, was hastening, brandishing a huge firebrand, from which a volume of smoke was pouring into the air. I was curious to know what the enormous firebrand could be wanted for, and could hardly believe that it was merely to light the man’s short pipe; he did not move a muscle of his counte-