Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/320

afternoon with five Americans, and at 4 P. M. we went into an enormous place to drink a cup of tea. There were certainly fifty girl waiters, and hundreds of customers. The tea-room included a long balcony above the sidewalk, and similar places are very numerous in Joburg. I am told that tea-drinking is one English habit American residents soon acquire. . . . The ordinary natives work long hours here. This evening I heard a boss say to a gang of street laborers: "Remember that we begin work Monday morning at 5:30, not at 6:30.". . . There are fourteen annual holidays here, observed by the whites as religiously as we observe Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July, but the natives do not seem to participate in them. If there is anything in having an abundant supply of cheap labor, South Africa should flourish. . . . Over in Missouri, many of the farmers have private graveyards. I find a similar custom among the Boer farmers in South Africa. . . . A big sign I saw at Bloemfontein contained this imprint: "D. Jones, writer." Meaning that D. Jones was the sign-writer who made it. Near the Hotel Cecil in Bloemfontein I also saw this sign: "Hotel Cecil Toilet Club." You might guess a week without guessing what the sign meant: the place was the hotel barber shop. . . . At hotels, I always hate to see the sign, "Fire Escape;" somehow it disturbs me. But the proprietor of the Langham thought up something more delicate; instead of the words "Fire Escape," he uses "Emergency Exit.". . . I am always meeting queer people; I met a woman lately who said she would as soon drink a cup of castor oil as a cup of rich cream.