"Fruits, meat and repentance,"[3] he read with painful uncertainty, when Hansie interrupted him with a laugh:
"That will do, Jim; you are wonderful, and you need not come again."
Other natives on the premises were of the shiftless, wandering type, changing hands continually, and many were the instances of their simplicity, not to say rank stupidity.
On one occasion a "raw" Kaffir, on being ordered to take a heavily laden wheelbarrow from one part of the garden to the other, was found half an hour later, still in the same place, vainly trying to place the wheelbarrow on his head!
I believe it was the same native who, when told to empty the contents of a waste-paper basket on a burning heap of rubbish in the garden, returned without the basket, and when asked what he had done with it, pointed, with an air of injured surprise, to its smouldering remains on the heap of rubbish.
Indeed, the patience of the housewife was often sorely tried. A relative of Mrs. van Warmelo's coming into the kitchen one morning, found one of these new "hands" before the stove in a sea of hot water, desperately trying to fill a small kettle by the spout, from a large one!
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Mÿn en dÿn.