Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/236

212 shore of Fife a small farmer is spoken of as a pachter or leaseholder, and sometimes described contemptuously as a pauchlin buddie. And even in so serious a matter as high politics words familiar in old Scotch land-tenure are heard. The Boer constitution or Grond-wet shows the well-known term a wad-set for a property pledged under a mortgage, and in our vernacular a bet or pledge is always a wad-g-er. A very common name, too, in Scotland for a farm, a place, is universal in South Africa. Thus one asks, "Hoe v'er is dit na die plaats van Oom Piet Steen?" How far is it to (Ger. nach) Old Pete Steen's place? The homestead in the Lowlands is the toon (Ger. Zaun, hedge, fence), but this the Boer uses strictly in its original sense of an enclosure, or in rural England a garth, as in the phrase, "Een meus kijk uit op die tuin," one may look out over the garden, given as one of the attractions of a particular lodging. The cultivated land of the Boer is without our most troublesome weed in olden times, the gool or wild marigold, but he has the name in his geel, yellow. He knows nothing of the old-fashioned bere or big, but oats he calls by its antique Scottish name, haver, a word that the song preserves in its "haver-meal bannocks." And when he mows his corn he speaks of whetting his scythe with a slijp, just as an Ayrshire man still does. Though he uses a Kaffir word for his sheep-pen (kraal), it might very well be called a fank as in the west of Scotland, for this shows his verb vangen to catch, from which comes our quaint legal terms, infang and ootfang theft, and the common description, "off the fang" applied to a water-pump when too dry for the valve to catch.

Mr. Reitz, Secretary of the quondam Transvaal Republic, enjoyed an English education, but seems to have returned to his home on the Veldt a confirmed separatist. His sense of patriotism, deepened by his sojourn here, led him to do for his brethren what King Alfred did for his Englishmen, and that was to supply them with a native literature, or at least a temporary substitute for it. He knew well that nothing so