Page:The Little Karoo (1925).djvu/27

 between Platkops dorp and Princestown village. Piet Deiselmann, eager, impetuous, a Platkops man who was full of pride for Dutch Platkops and contempt for English Princestown, was speaking to the old Jew-woman and her grandson of the new hospital which had lately been opened in Platkops dorp, and of which Juriaan up in the mountains had never heard before. The hospital was the first to be built in the Little Karoo, and it was Dutch Platkops that had built it. In Princestown, said Piet Deiselmann contemptuously, men might still die by hundreds for want of a hospital, but in Platkops there was now no need to suffer pain. One went to the Platkops hospital so ill that one had to be carried there, and one left it leaping and praising the Lord.

All that Piet Deiselmann said of the hospital filled Juriaan, with Deltje’s damp twisted face always before him, with a strange agitation of hope, wonder, and fear. For long he dared not speak. But at last, in