It was, therefore, a large household, and when the day’s work was over, a merry, home-like party in the evenings.
It seemed to the lads as if they were transported back a couple of centuries while they rested in this vine farm. The buildings were nearly the same age as the great oak trees that surrounded them and shaded the roadways. The tiles and bricks with which they were built had been made in and brought from Holland. Everything was quaint, old-fashioned, and picturesque. The master of the house was patriarchal with his family and servants, and the mother was a real mistress after the good old style.
Morning and evening the old Bible was brought out, and every one was forced to join in the religious exercise. The master did not greatly believe in his coloured servants having souls, yet as this had come to be a disputed question amongst some of the advanced Boers, Van Groblaar gave them the benefit of the doubt, and made them also attend family worship. He was a strict and severe master with these dark-skinned bondmen and bondwomen, yet his patriarchal system appeared to be the right one as far as they were concerned. On this farm they did their work much better than they would have done under the English system.
The girls had been educated at the best Cape schools. They could play on the piano, and had all the other accomplishments of young ladies.
Yet this did not make them disdain household and farm work. They were all able to milk the cows, make butter and cheese, and do all the other duties expected from a Dutch housewife. They reserved their fancy accomplishments for the evenings, and were up to their daily work long before the sun rose.
Although it was a remarkably enjoyable life which the boys led at Stellenbosch, they quickly wearied of it, and began to long for something more exciting. The riding lessons which they took with the sons, and the gun practice were all very useful, yet humiliating also, since they could never hope to compete with those born marksmen and centaurs. It is almost impossible for a true Africander to miss his mark or be unseated from his horse.
As soon, therefore, as they had learnt something about the managing of cattle and Kaffirs, and had found their way about the country, they began to find the society of their puritanical burgher friends slightly irksome. The charming scenery became monotonous, and the tinkle of a piano almost as hard to endure as a barrel-organ is to some ears.
The desire to trek had come upon them, and whenever men or boys get that desire, no fertile oasis, no earthly paradise, can hold them back from the desert.
Stephanus, who was in their confidence, had a private conversation with his uncle Groblaar, and communicated the result one morning to them as they were moping amongst the ripening grapes.
It was not easy for the young ladies or the stolid sons of Van Groblaar to understand how any human being could be melancholy as long as there was plenty to eat and drink. In their own placid minds three of the daughters had decided that Ned, Fred, and Clarence had the makings of very good farmers and husbands in them, and for this felt gratified to Cousin Stephanus for bringing them.