“My child,—one does not smile when one is happiest. Yes I am happy, for God has forgiven me my sins and whitened my heart.”
“Do you no longer hate Uncle Gideon?”
“No, my child—all that is past.” Elsie sat silently nestled against her father’s side until long after the others had gone to rest. The soft touch of the night wind made the leaves of the mulberry tree whisper as with a thousand tongues. To Stephanus they seemed as the tongues of angels welcoming him to his place among the saved. To blind Elsie they sang that the feud which had made her father’s life full of trouble was at an end; that he and she were happy together under the stars which she had never seen. Happiness seemed to descend upon her like a dove. Its poignancy fatigued her so that she sank to sleep.
Chapter Four.
Uncle Diederick.
Uncle Diederick lived in a structure known in South Africa as a “hartebeeste house.” Such a structure suggests a house of cards in its most rudimentary form—when one card is laid against another and thus an edifice like roof without walls is formed.
The house looked indeed like a roof with a very high pitch, from under which the walls had sunk away until it rested on the ground. Thickly thatched, and closed by a vertical wall at the end opposite the door, it was very warm in cold weather and, in spite of the want of ventilation, fairly cool in the heat of summer.
The end farthest from the door was fitted up with shelving, and the shelves were loaded with bundles of dried plants and jars, filled with tinctures, infusions and decoctions. In front of the shelves stood a table and a bench,—the former bearing an ordinary pair of grocers’ scales, and an immense volume which the sage always referred to before prescribing. This volume was a translation into Dutch of a collection of herbalistic lore published in Italy in the Sixteenth Century; it was looked upon by Uncle Diederick’s numerous customers with almost as much respect as the Bible.