He looked what he was—­a Boer of mixed Dutch and French lineage.  Later on I got into conversation with him, and he told me a good deal of his life.  His father was descended from one of the old Dutch families who had emigrated to South Africa in search of religious liberty in the old days, when the country was a wilderness.  His mother had come in an unbroken line from one of the noble families of France who fled from home in the days of the terrible persecution of the Huguenots.  He himself had been many things—­hunter, trader, farmer, fighting man.  He had fought against the natives, and he had fought against our people.  The younger man was his son, a tall, fair fellow, scarcely more than a stripling, and I had no need to be a prophet or a prophet’s son to tell that his very hours were numbered.  Both the father and the lad had been wounded by one of our shells, and it was pitiful to watch them as they lay side by side, the elder man holding the hand of the younger in a loving clasp, whilst with his other hand he stroked the boyish face with gestures that were infinitely pathetic.  Just as the stars were coming out that night between the clouds that floated over us the Boer boy sobbed his young life out, and all through the long watches of that mournful darkness the father lay with his dead laddie’s hand in his.  The pain of his own wounds must have been dreadful, but I heard no moan of anguish from his lips.  When, at the dawning, they came to take the dead boy from the living man, the stern old warrior simply pressed his grizzled lips to the cold face, and then turned his grey beard to the hard earth and made no further sign; but I knew well that, had the sacrifice been possible, he would gladly have given his life to save the young one’s.

A Boer fighting laager.

Burghersdorp.

Many and wonderful are the stories written and published concerning the Boer and his habits when on the war-path.  Most of these stories are written by men who take good care never to get within a hundred miles of the fighting line, but content themselves with an easy chair, a cigar, a bottle of whisky, and carpet slippers on the stoep of some good hotel in a pretty little Boer town.  To scribes of this calibre flock a certain class of British resident, who is always full to the very ears of his own dauntless courage, his deathless loyalty to the Queen and Empire, his love for the soldier, and his hatred of the Boer.  This gallant class of British resident has half a million excuses ready to his hand to explain why he did not take a rifle and fight when the war summons rang clarion-like through the land.  Then he grits his teeth, knits his eyebrows, clenches his hands in spasmodic wrath, throws out his chest, and tells his auditors, in a voice husky with concentrated wrath and whisky, what he intends to do the next time the damnable Boer rises to fight.  The old British pioneer may have whelped a few million good fighting