This mode of punishing recalcitrant persons was picked up, I am told, from one of the savage tribes.  I do not know if this is so or not, but there is no doubt that the niggers know all about it, because one day, when I found that one of my niggers had been helping himself lavishly to my tobacco, I promised to stand him on an ant-heap as soon as I had finished shaving.  Five minutes later my other nigger, Lazarus, came into my tent and informed me that Johnnie had bolted.  I went out, and by the aid of my glasses I could just espy a black dot away out on the veldt, making a rapid and direct line for the land of the Basutos; and that was the last I ever saw or heard of tobacco-loving, work-dodging, truth-twisting Johnnie.

There is a distinctly humorous side to the Boer character, which crops out sometimes in his methods of dealing out justice to those who have done the thing that seems evil in his sight.  If there is a fellow in laager who is not amenable to orders, one of those malcontents who desires to have everything his own way—­and there generally is one of these cherubs in every large gathering of men all the world over—­the commandant first calls him up and warns him that he is making himself a pest to the whole commando, and exhorts him to mend his manners.  As a general thing the commandant throws a few slabs of Scripture appropriate to the occasion at the disturber’s ears, and mixes it judiciously with a good deal of worldly wisdom, all of which tending to teach the fellow that he is about as desirable as a comrade as a sore eye in a sand-storm.  Should the exhortation not have the desired effect, and the offender continue to stir up strife in laager, as a lame mule stirs up mud in midstream, then the commandant sends a guard of young men to gather in the unruly one.  He is captured with as little ceremony as a nigger captures a hog in the midst of his mealy patch.  They strip him bare to the waist, and put a bridle on his head; the bit is jammed into his mouth, and firmly buckled there, and then the circus begins.  One of the guards takes the reins, usually a couple of long lengths of raw hide; another flicks the human steed on the bare ribs with a sjambok, and he is ordered to show his paces.  He has to walk, trot, canter, gallop, and “tripple” all around the laager several times, amidst the badinage and laughter of the burghers, and he gets enough “chaff” during the journey to last the biggest horse in England a lifetime.

It is bad enough when there are only men there, but when there are, as is often the case, a dozen or two of women and girls present his woe is served up to him full measure and brimming over.  The men roar with laughter, and pelt him with crusts of rusks, but the women and girls make his life an agony for the time being.  They smile at him sweetly, and ask him if he feels lonely without a cart, or they pull up a handful of grass and offer it to him on the end of a stick, making a lot of “stage aside” remarks concerning the length of his ears the while, until the fellow’s face crimsons with shame.