Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/223

Rh Gothic ancestors when they moved slowly but irresistibly westwards across the great plain of Europe even to the shores of the North Sea. But the monotony of his outlook over the arid, treeless veldt is very different from that of his remote ancestor, hemmed in by the weird gloom of the primeval forest, where lurked the wolf and the bear and the wild boar. The climate compels him to be on the move still. At the end of April he packs up his waggons on the high veldt where he has spent the summer, shuts up his house, and treks to the lower or bush veldt for the winter feeding. The rains set in at the end of September, when he returns to his house with his belongings. This is a primitive custom of northern lands adapted to new conditions. The "summer sheelins" lingered longest in the Highlands, but they were general in Old Scotland. In the "Complaint of Scotland" (1545?) there is a delightfully realistic description of this popular custom, which did more than all else put together to foster the popular literature of ballad, song, dance, and folk-lore generally. But of this aspect there seems to exist only Psalm-singing among the Boers. Another seasonal word, oogst, harvest (oo'st tijd, in the Taal), has also been transferred by the first settlers to their new home under the Southern Cross, for it is but another form of August. This oo'st of the Boer is the old French Aoust (Août) of his Dutch Huguenot ancestors. The original significance of the term must long have been forgotten, for this month is nearly mid-winter in South Africa.

An officer in the first Boer War graphically sketches the landscape on the veldt ("Blackwood's Magazine," 1880-81): "You may travel a hundred miles without seeing a tree. Houses are ugly cottages, with low roofs of galvanised iron, so low as to escape notice altogether but for the clump of blue gums beside them" (cf. "Cottar's Saturday Night,"—

"A few acres not far off are under the plough. Through the middle of the scene is a stream or bog, from which water is got. Round a part of it runs a stone wall to keep the cattle out. The windows of the house have four small panes. Pigs, cows, and dogs and children run at large together. The roads are a bit