Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/292

 general principles. He cheerfully takes orders from Mr. Cary, but it humiliates him to take orders from Mrs. Cary; having six wives of his own, it irritates him to be ordered around by a woman Sampson, the waiter, does the sweeping and scrubbing in the Cary home, but the beds are made and looked after by a white maid. Mrs. Cary has a very handsome flower garden, and a special boy is regularly employed to look after it. As it is in bloom summer and winter, he is kept very busy, even with the occasional assistance of Sampson. The Carys have an automobile, but the driver is a white man; blacks are not allowed to run automobiles here It is related that the negroes were once greatly excited in Johannesburg over a rumor of a Kaffir uprising. One woman said to her black boy:

"You wouldn't kill your missus, would you?"

"Oh, no," the boy replied; "boy next door kill you, and I kill his missus."

The affair, it seemed, had all been arranged, and very delicately at that. This boy's name was "Machinery." The blacks take any name they hear used among the whites, and "Machinery" is a very common name in Johannesburg At the Cary home, when I was there, domestic ducks, baked, were a part of the dinner. A considerable quantity was left after all had been served.

"Will you get what is left over?" I asked Mrs. Cary.

"You bet I will," she laughingly replied, using an American expression to amuse the American guests. With our black servants at home, they always get what is left over from a dinner, but in a South-African home,