Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/257

 oxen. In several places, negro laborers were cutting oats, and the harvester was also pulled by oxen. This was the rule in the early days in eastern Kansas; many of the older farmers will remember when oxen were used almost entirely for farm work. If I were dissatisfied with my present location (which I am not), I should have no hesitancy in locating in South Africa after seeing that part of it lying between Durban and Johannesburg. The country looks like the best portions of the United States, and not one-tenth of it seems to be cultivated. We saw a good many sheep, but not one-hundredth part as many as we saw in Australia and New Zealand, although the grass was much better. Altogether, the impression left on my mind was this: A surprisingly good country, and very little advantage taken of it I doubt if I saw a corn-field of fifty acres; the patches were all small, and weedy. In most cases the stalks of the field corn were as small as the stalks of our sweet corn. The farming is mostly done by negroes; either as independent farmers, or as farm laborers. If some of the corn farmers of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas had this land, it would produce better crops This refers mainly to Natal. The rainfall is less toward Johannesburg: I thought I could notice a difference when we crossed into the Transvaal a little before noon today. Toward Johannesburg, there is more stock-raising; the country looks much like Kansas two hundred miles west of the Missouri river. Still, the Transvaal looks better than the best parts of Australia I saw. But in Australia, the very best is made of everything, while here shiftlessness is the rule. The natives (negroes)