The Boer is not particular in the matter of cleanliness.  It suits him just as well to be dirty as to be clean.  It is no exaggeration to say that numbers of Boers do not wash themselves from one week’s end to another; and they wear their clothes until they drop off.  It is always a matter for speculation what the womenfolks do.  It is certain that they do not exert themselves too much, if at all, in their own homes.  They generally do all the cooking and eating in one room, and in the other end of the house you will probably find a litter of pigs, a score of hens, etc.  And the one room is about as clean as the other—­most people would prefer to sleep alongside the pigs and the fowls.

The most painful proceeding is to dine in such a place.  Unless you are blessed with a cast-iron constitution and a stomach of the same pattern, you are not likely to survive.  Usually they put down boiled meat first, after which comes the soup.  The chief regret in your case is that the soup had not come first, so that you could have disposed of it right away and had something on top of it.  Coffee, of course, is never forgotten, and it would be a direct insult to refuse it.  Coffee is a great thing with the Boer.  He would as soon be without house and home, as his bag of coffee.  Before selling his wool to the merchant, almost the first thing he asks is:  ‘What is your price for coffee?’ If a satisfactory quotation is forthcoming, he does not hesitate long in disposing of his staple, although, of course, at the highest price obtainable.

The story goes that once upon a time a Boer, whose conscience had remained dormant from his birth, came to a certain town to purchase goods in exchange for produce.  One of the articles he bought was, naturally, coffee, and of that he took half a bag.  While the clerk was engaged in attending to some other matters, the Boer quietly and, as he thought, unobserved, undid the cord which secured the mouth of the coffee bag, and slipped in a quarter of a hundred-weight of lead which was lying in the vicinity and which he evidently calculated on finding useful.  The clerk observed this movement without betraying the fact, and when the order was completed his eye fell upon the coffee bag casually.

‘Oh! wait a moment,’ he remarked.  ’I fancy I have forgotten to weigh that coffee.’

He weighed it over again and carefully noted down the figures in his little book, no doubt much to the chagrin of the silent Boer, who probably had not reckoned on paying for his lead in the same proportion as the cost of his coffee per pound.