I confess I am sorry for Jack.  He is the kitchen-boy, and is learning with much pains and difficulty the wrong language.  My cook is also French, and, naturally, all that Jack learns is French, and not English.  Imagine poor Jack’s dismay when, after his three years’ apprenticeship to us is ended, he seeks perhaps to better himself, and finds that no one except madame can understand him!  Most of their dialogues are carried on by pantomime and the incessant use, in differing tones of voice, of the word “Ja.”  Jack is a big, loutish young man, but very ugly and feeble, and apparently under the impression that he is perpetually “wanted” to answer for the little indiscretion, whatever it was, on account of which he was forced to flee over the border.  He is timid and scared to the last degree, and abjectly anxious to please if it does not entail too much exertion.  He is, as it were, apprenticed to us for three years.  We are bound to feed and clothe and doctor him, and he is to work for us, in his own lazy fashion, for small wages.  The first time Jack broke a plate his terror and despair were quite edifying to behold.  Madame called him a “maladroit” on the spot.  Jack learned this word, and after his work was over seated himself gravely on the ground with the fragments of the plate, which he tried to join together, but gave up the attempt at last, announcing in his own tongue that it was “dead.”  After a little consideration he said slowly, several times, “Maldraw, ja,” and hit himself a good thump at each “ja.” Now, I grieve to say, Jack breaks plates, dishes and cups with a perfectly easy and unembarrassed conscience, and is already far too civilized to care in the least for his misfortunes in that line.  Whenever a fowl is killed—­and I came upon Jack slowly putting one to death the other day with a pair of nail-scissors—­he possesses himself of a small store of feathers, which he wears tastefully placed over his left ear.  A gay ribbon, worn like a bandeau across the forehead, is what he really loves.  Jack is very proud of a tawdry ribbon of many colors with a golden ground which I found for him the other day, only he never can make up his mind where to wear it; and I often come upon him sitting in the shade with the ribbon in his hands, gravely considering the question.

The Pickle and plague of the establishment, however, is the boy Tom, a grinning young savage fresh from his kraal, up to any amount of mischief, who in an evil hour has been engaged as the baby’s body-servant.  I cannot trust him with the child out of my sight for a moment, for he “snuffs” enormously, and smokes coarse tobacco out of a cow’s horn, and is anxious to teach the baby both these accomplishments.  Tom wears his snuff-box—­which is a brass cylinder a couple of inches long—­in either ear impartially, there being huge slits in the cartilage for the purpose, and the baby never rests till he gets possession of it and sneezes himself nearly into