Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/303

$120 a month, but in order to do this, he is compelled to get in forty days in a month. The engineer makes $5 for a day's work of eleven hours. . . . On the way we passed a flock of thirty or forty ostriches grazing in a field, like cattle, but this isn't considered a very good ostrich country. We also passed through the Paardeburg battle-field, on the Modder river, where General Cronje surrendered 4,000 men to a superior force of British. There are two cemeteries on the field, in which are buried the English and Boer soldiers who were killed in the battle. The Modder river battle-field does not look unlike the Custer battle-field on the Little Big Horn river in Montana. Indeed, the country between Bloemfontein and Kimberley does not look unlike the dry country in Montana. . . . We saw almost no cultivated fields on the way, but a great many cattle, and a few sheep. There is not a town between Bloemfontein and Kimberley: it is a frontier country, and the railroad has been in operation only four or five years. A man I met on the train says that in his section of the Orange Free State the soil is black and rich, and that fine crops of corn are raised; but I have seen no such country. He lives in a country town of 800 people, off the railroad, and says he pays only fourteen cents a pound for the best beef, while butter sells at 24 cents, and eggs at from 18 to 30 cents. In his country, the Boer women do their own cooking, but hire negroes to wait on them, and do the rough work. An ordinary negro house servant receives $4 a month; a particularly good one, $1.25 per week. . . . Kimberley, as you approach it by railroad, looks like Johannesburg, though it is much smaller. You see the