Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/226

202 life is his horse that he says, "Ik het een honger as een paard," for our "hungry as a hawk." But the bridle is known as toom, identical with the English team, though in a different sense. As in all primitive communities, the thong is the handiest material for cordage, and this is the Boer reim or reimpjie. "He had knee-haltered the animal with too great a length of reim. Tom, the Kaffir boy, was dressed in the ordinary slop clothes of a store, more or less tattered, and more or less ingeniously repaired with bits of reimpjie" ("A Veldt Official"). In German the word is Riemen, but is also Old English. As it is properly applied to long, narrow strips of hide, one should connect it with the Scottish runes (m and n frequently interchange), the selvage of cloth. Hence Burns jocosely calls mischievous youngsters run-deils, strips, as it were, of Old Nick. In the Scots Privy Council Registers (1620) there is an interesting example of the word: "Grite abuse by slascheing of hydis and cutting of some of the rime away."

To complete his equipment the Boer wants only his gun, and this he visualises by a term peculiarly his own. "Roden could find no buyer for his old smooth-bore. A Boer would pick it up. 'A good roer,' would be his verdict, 'an excellent roer in its day'" ("A Veldt Official"). This word is explained by the German Rohr, a reed. It is only a variant of rush, as in bulrush, or in Burns's "Green Grow the Rashes," where rashes means, however, a different plant. The roer is the Boer's constant companion. He is not only a born sportsman, but, as lord over an inferior but treacherous race, man of war from his youth up." Knowing himself to be left as his own master, one of a governing few among many, he instinctively selects the defensive positions which the country affords in abundance. He prefers the advantage of a kopje, and using the stones scattered about in profusion, speedily constructs his schants or breastwork. Here we have the German Schanze, common on the lower Rhine in the sense of a bundle of sticks, such as the Dutch construct so cleverly to fence their waterways. This old Dutch word is used in the form sconce by Shakspere, both as bulwark and humorously as the skull, the bulwark of the head: "To knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel." When the Boer finds himself snugly en-sconced he is a wary