Go down into the streets, and Burghersdorp is an ideal of Arcady.  The broad, dusty, unmetalled roads are steeped in sunshine.  The houses are all one-storeyed, some brick, some mud, some the eternal corrugated iron, most faced with whitewash, many fronted with shady verandahs.  As blinds against the sun they have lattices of trees down every street—­white-blossoming laburnum, poplars, sycamores.

Despite verandahs and trees, the sunshine soaks down into every corner—­genially, languorously warm.  All Burghersdorp basks.  You see half-a-dozen yoke of bullocks with a waggon, standing placidly in the street, too lazy even to swish their tails against the flies; pass by an hour later, and they are still there, and the black man lounging by the leaders has hardly shifted one leg; pass by at evening, and they have moved on three hundred yards, and are resting again.  In the daytime hens peck and cackle in every street; at nightfall the bordering veldt hums with crickets and bullfrogs.  At morn come a flight of locusts—­first, yellow-white scouts whirring down every street, then a pelting snowstorm of them high up over the houses, spangling the blue heaven.  But Burghersdorp cared nothing.  “There is nothing for them,” said a farmer, with cosy satisfaction; “the frost killed everything last week.”

British and Dutch salute and exchange the news with lazy mutual tolerance.  The British are storekeepers and men of business; the Boers ride in from their farms.  They are big, bearded men, loose of limb, shabbily dressed in broad-brimmed hats, corduroy trousers, and brown shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter erect and easy; unkempt, rough, half-savage, their tanned faces and blue eyes express lazy good-nature, sluggish stubbornness, dormant fierceness.  They ask the news in soft, lisping Dutch that might be a woman’s; but the lazy imperiousness of their bearing stamps them as free men.  A people hard to rouse, you say—­and as hard, when roused, to subdue.

A loitering Arcady—­and then you hear with astonishment that Burghersdorp is famous throughout South Africa as a stronghold of bitter Dutch partisanship.  “Rebel Burghersdorp” they call it in the British centres, and Capetown turns anxious ears towards it for the first muttering of insurrection.  What history its stagnant annals record is purely anti-British.  Its two principal monuments, after the Jubilee fountain, are the tombstone of the founder of the Dopper Church—­the Ironsides of South Africa—­and a statue with inscribed pedestal complete put up to commemorate the introduction of the Dutch tongue into the Cape Parliament.  Malicious comments add that Afrikander patriotism swindled the stone-mason out of L30, and it is certain that one of the gentlemen whose names appear thereon most prominently, now languishes in jail for fraud.  Leaving that point for thought, I find that the rest of Burghersdorp’s history consists in the fact that the Afrikander Bond was founded here in 1881.  And at this moment Burghersdorp is out-Bonding the Bond:  the reverend gentleman who edits its Dutch paper and dictates its Dutch policy sluices out weekly vials of wrath upon Hofmeyr and Schreiner for machinating to keep patriot Afrikanders off the oppressing Briton’s throat.