The one break in the sameness of their daily routine was family prayers; the one weekly event, going to church at Salisbury.

Still, they had a single enthusiasm.

Like everybody else for fifty miles around, they believed profoundly in the "future of Rhodesia." When I gazed about me at the raw new land--the weary flat of red soil and brown grasses--I felt at least that, with a present like that, it had need of a future.
I am not by disposition a pioneer; I belong instinctively to the old civilisations.

In the midst of rudimentary towns and incipient fields, I yearn for grey houses, a Norman church, an English thatched cottage.
However, for Hilda's sake, I braved it out, and continued to learn the A B C of agriculture on an unmade farm with great assiduity from Oom Jan Willem.
We had been stopping some months at Klaas's together when business compelled me one day to ride in to Salisbury.

I had ordered some goods for my farm from England which had at last arrived.