While we eat our dinner we carry on baskets full of earth, as though the devil drove us.

The Kaffer servants have a story that at night a witch and two white oxen come to help us.

No wall, they say, could grow so quickly under one man's hands.
At night, alone in our cabin, we sit no more brooding over the fire.
What should we think of now?
All is emptiness.

So we take the old arithmetic; and the multiplication table, which with so much pains we learnt long ago and forgot directly, we learn now in a few hours, and never forget again.

We take a strange satisfaction in working arithmetical problems.