Page 323 - The Diary of A. H. W. Behrens

156
Matthew 19
And this is how it all happened: during the first years in Bethanie a farmer offered father two young Bossekop mares for sale, unsalted. Father bought them cheaply. They both salted, i.e. they got the horse disease and overcame it and were thus immune and valuable. Without having been salted, horses in the Rustenburg District were worth nothing, they all died. And, miraculously, the foals of the two Bossekop mares were also salted and their foals too and that is how it continued so that in due course father had a herd of horses from which he could sell horses at between ₤ 40 and ₤ 60 per horse!! And when in 1879 a farmer, Adrian Klopper, offered him 2 500 acres on the neighbouring Waaikraal at ₤ 1 000, father had ₤ 250 from the horses he had sold and he received an inheritance of ₤ 250 from an old aunt in Germany and with these ₤ 500
he could buy one half of Waaikraal with a house on it, with large fields that could be irrigated from the Sterkstroom so
that he had safe harvests of wheat, maize, potatoes, fruit, oats and vegetables. (Read more about the other half on p. 36.) On Bethanie he had had nothing and now suddenly he had an own farm that would supply him with all necessary food.