Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/259

 home; frequently cows are worked with them, and when a cow works under the yoke, her calf usually travels beside her. In the middle of nearly every string of work-oxen, you see a pair of yearlings or two-year-olds being worked to "break" them. Donkeys are also extensively worked here; no disease attacks the donkey, whereas cattle often die as do our hogs with cholera, and I frequently saw ten to twelve donkeys working to one wagon Soon after passing into the Transvaal, I noticed that much of the prairie land seemed somewhat stony. What we call "nigger-heads" were numerous; reddish-looking stones worn into the shape of circular beehives, by long exposure to the weather. These turned out to be ant-hills, so hardened by long exposure to the weather that they will turn a bullet; during the late war, the Boers used them for protection. There are countless billions and trillions of ants here, and you are never out of sight of their hills in the Transvaal. In some places the ant-hills are so large that the natives chase out the ants, and use the hills for houses The fences in the prairie country are always of wire, and the posts of iron, and sod houses, most of them tumbling down, are as common as they were in western Kansas thirty years ago The Transvaal is that section to which the Boers made their great trek, owing to friction with the English along the coast. In the Transvaal was later discovered the Johannesburg gold mines, and it was the owners of these mines who brought on the Boer war. Should Kansas and Nebraska go to war with England, it would not be a much more remarkable performance than the Transvaal