we did not seek those men’s blood; we gave them quarter as soon as they asked for it, and after that, though we knew very well they had done all that men could do to involve us in a war of extermination with a great nation, we sent their leader home to his own country to be tried by his own countrymen, and the rank and file we forgave freely.  We may be a nation of white savages, but our past does not prove it, and if Britain wins in the war now going on she will have to be very generous indeed before we will need to blush for our conduct.”

“Why should not the white population of South Africa be ready to live under the protection of Britain?  The yoke cannot be so heavy when men of all creeds, colours, and nationalities who have lived under that rule for years are now ready to volunteer to fight for her, even against you, who have admittedly done them no direct wrong?”

“Why should we live under any flag but our own?” replied the old fighting man passionately.  “We came here and found the country a wilderness in the hands of savages; we fought our way into the land step by step, holding our own with our rifles; we had to live lives of fearful hardships, facing wild beasts and wilder men; we won with the strong hand the land we live in.  Why should we bow our necks to Britain’s yoke, even if it be a yoke of silk?” And as he spoke a murmur of deep and earnest sympathy ran through the ranks of the Boers who were standing around him.

“You, of course, blame all the Colonials, Australians and others, for coming to fight against you?” I asked.  “I don’t know that I do, or that my people do, in a sense,” the veteran replied.  “It all depends upon the spirit which animated them.  If your Australians, who are of British blood, came here to fight for your Motherland, believing that her cause was a just and a holy one, and that she needed your aid, you did right, for a son will help his mother, if he be a son worth having; but if the Australians came here merely for the sake of adventure, merely for sport, as men come in time of peace to shoot buck on the veldt, then woe to that land, for though God may make no sign to-day nor to-morrow, yet, in His own time, He will surely wring from Australia a full recompense in sweat and blood and tears; for whether we be right or wrong, our God knows that we are giving our lives freely for what we in our hearts believe to be a holy cause.”

“What do you fellows think of Australians as fighters?”

I asked the question carelessly, but the answer that I got brought me to my bearings quickly, for then I learnt that more than one gallant Australian officer dear to me had fallen, never to rise again, since I had been taken prisoner.  The man who spoke was little more than a lad, a pale-faced, slenderly built son of the veldt.  He had tangled curly hair, and big, pathetic blue eyes, soft as a girl’s, and limbs that lacked the rugged strength of the old Boer stock; but there was that nameless “something,”