Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/224

200 of dirty tape thrown down carelessly on the veldt, and not even pulled tight. Waggons are always straying from the track for firmer ground. In bottoms flows a marshy spruit or burn. Where there is a drift or ford this is churned into pools, where may be a dead ox is lying." If we substitute thatch for the galvanised roof this might pass for a description of much of Scotland, even so recently as last century. In fact it is a graphic picture of an old-time Highland clachan set amid its background of local colour. Certainly wheeled vehicles in Old Scotland were fewer, but the bridle tracks sought the firm high ground as independently, avoiding the bogs where the cattle might be lairdet (bemired). The ford was as troublesome as the drift, and equally a source of danger or delay when a spate came down. The Boer transferred the name veldt from his northern home. It is the Norwegian and Scottish fell. An obscure survival of it in Scotland is haemit, a peculiarly expressive word for what is homely and familiar. A less contracted form—haemilt—prevails in the North-eastern counties, where it means pasture adjoining an enclosure. In Icelandic it is heimilt, a contraction for the heim-veld. One familiar only with haemit might well take haemilt to be a corruption instead of the purer and older form.

The Boer farming customs are much like those of Old Scotland, where the farm land was divided into the infield or arable portion, enclosed by a fael or turf dyke, and the outfield or open grazings on the moorland. The name itself, as bower, is regularly used in Ayrshire for a dairy farmer on the steelbow, Fr. métayer, system. Near the homestead was the loanin or haemilt where the cows were kept at milking-time or during the heat of the day; and this ground, being thus heavily manured or tothed, as it was called, raised the best bere crop of the following season. In the dry air of the veldt the cow-dung is invaluable as fuel, but in bygone Scotland it was too frequently thrown into the burn, which was as little conserved as a Boer spruit. This word is well known in Scotland, though in a different sense, that is, as the spruit or spout of a kettle. Before the introduction of draining many were the wet spots where the rushes grew in such plenty that the general name for the plant was sprits Originally sprit meant to spurt or squirt out water