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Show LIFE IN THE PRAIRIES. An immigrant finds plenty of elbow room on the prairies of South Africa. The land is, in the main, an immense flat, no doubt; very large tracts of alluvial, without a tree or pebble; part of it mere swamps or salt wilderness. But even these thousand miles of unbroken level are not without a peculiar beauty of their own; the boundless horizon and awful solitude; the freshness and purity of the atmosphere, and the keen enjoyment of unlimited freedom. Nor, apart from intercourse with his fellow man, is a man here crushed by the sense of utter forlornness; for nothing is more striking than the teeming life of the animal kingdom in the pampas - the abundance of game, the storks and herons, the owls and the hawks; the flights of the wild turkeys and flocks of ostriches, to say nothing of the ubiquitous pteroptere and chattering little cardinal, a vast multitude and variety of fowls and bratos nameless to me as well as numberless - the gayety of whose plumage and fur and the strangeness and wildness of whose screeches and howls a settler will always and everywhere have with him, and which will only gradually make room for the flocks and herds, the barking and bellowing, the crowing and cackling of his domestic surroundings. Life in the prairie is life in the saddle, for the very beggar here is mounted, that being the only available method of progression. The horses are docile, fleet and sure-footed, and cost little to buy or to keep. |