Just then the proprietor, a gigantic, pasty colonist, came up, with his pipe, and stood calmly looking on.  Staines came down, and made a sort of apology.  Bulteel smiled quietly, and asked what harm they could do him, raking that rubbish.  “Rake it all avay, mine vriends,” said he:  “ve shall thank you moch.”

He then invited them languidly to his house.  They went with him, and as he volunteered no more remarks, they questioned him, and learned his father had been a Hollander, and so had his vrow’s.  This accounted for the size and comparative cleanliness of his place.  It was stuccoed with the lime of the country outside, and was four times as large as the miserable farmhouses of the degenerate Boers.  For all this, the street door opened on the principal room, and that room was kitchen and parlor, only very large and wholesome.  “But, Lord,” as poor dear Pepys used to blurt out—­“to see how some folk understand cleanliness!” The floor was made of powdered ants’ nests, and smeared with fresh cow-dung every day.  Yet these people were the cleanest Boers in the colony.

The vrow met them, with a snow-white collar and cuffs of Hamburgh linen, and the brats had pasty faces round as pumpkins, but shone with soap.  The vrow was also pasty-faced, but gentle, and welcomed them with a smile, languid, but unequivocal.

The Hottentots took their horses, as a matter of course.  Their guns were put in a corner.  A clean cloth was spread, and they saw they were to sup and sleep there, though the words of invitation were never spoken.

At supper, sun-dried flesh, cabbage, and a savory dish the travellers returned to with gusto.  Staines asked what it was:  the vrow told him—­locusts.  They had stripped her garden, and filled her very rooms, and fallen in heaps under her walls; so she had pressed them, by the million, into cakes, had salted them lightly, and stored them, and they were excellent, baked.

After supper, the accomplished Reginald, observing a wire guitar, tuned it with some difficulty, and so twanged it, and sang ditties to it, that the flabby giant’s pasty face wore a look of dreamy content over his everlasting pipe; and in the morning, after a silent breakfast, he said, “Mine vriends, stay here a year or two, and rake in mine rubbish.  Ven you are tired, here are springbok and antelopes, and you can shoot mit your rifles, and ve vil cook them, and you shall zing us zongs of Vaderland.”

They thanked him heartily, and said they would stay a few days, at all events.

The placid Boer went a-farming; and the pair shouldered their pick and shovel, and worked on their heap all day, and found a number of pretty stones, but no diamond.

“Come,” said Falcon, “we must go to the river;” and Staines acquiesced.  “I bow to experience,” said he.

At the threshold they found two of the little Bulteels, playing with pieces of quartz, crystal, etc., on the door-stone.  One of these stones caught Staines’s eye directly.  It sparkled in a different way from the others:  he examined it:  it was the size of a white haricot bean, and one side of it polished by friction.  He looked at it, and looked, and saw that it refracted the light.  He felt convinced it was a diamond.