I could not get Marie out of my mind; her image was with me by day and by night, especially by night, which caused me to sleep badly.  I became morose, supersensitive, and excitable.  I developed a cough, and thought, as did others, that I was going into a decline.  I remember that Hans even asked me once if I would not come and peg out the exact place where I should like to be buried, so that I might be sure that there would be no mistake made when I could no longer speak for myself.  On that occasion I kicked Hans, one of the few upon which I have ever touched a native.  The truth was that I had not the slightest intention of being buried.  I wanted to live and marry Marie, not to die and be put in a hole by Hans.  Only I saw no prospect of marrying Marie, or even of seeing her again, and that was why I felt low-spirited.

Of course, from time to time news of the trek-Boers reached us, but it was extremely confused.  There were so many parties of them; their adventures were so difficult to follow, and, I may add, often so terrible; so few of them could write; trustworthy messengers were so scanty; distances were so great.  At any rate, we heard nothing of Marais’s band except a rumour that they had trekked to a district in what is now the Transvaal, which is called Rustenberg, and thence on towards Delagoa Bay into an unknown veld where they had vanished.  From Marie herself no letter came, which showed me clearly enough that she had not found an opportunity of sending one.

Observing my depressed condition, my father suggested as a remedy that I should go to the theological college at Cape Town and prepare myself for ordination.  But the Church as a career did not appeal to me, perhaps because I felt that I could never be sufficiently good; perhaps because I knew that as a clergyman I should find no opportunity of travelling north when my call came.  For I always believed that this call would come.

My father, who wished that I should hear another kind of call, was vexed with me over this matter.  He desired earnestly that I should follow the profession which he adorned, and indeed saw no other open for me any more than I did myself.  Of course he was right in a way, seeing that in the end I found none, unless big game hunting and Kaffir trading can be called a profession.  I don’t know, I am sure.  Still, poor business as it may be, I say now when I am getting towards the end of life that I am glad I did not follow any other.  It has suited me; that was the insignificant hole in the world’s affairs which I was destined to fit, whose only gifts were a remarkable art of straight shooting and the more common one of observation mixed with a little untrained philosophy.

So hot did our arguments become about this subject of the Church, for, as may be imagined, in the course of them I revealed some unorthodoxy, especially as regards the matter of our methods of Christianising Kaffirs, that I was extremely thankful when a diversion occurred which took me away from home.  The story of my defence of Maraisfontein had spread far, and that of my feats of shooting, especially in the Goose Kloof, still farther.  So the end of it was that those in authority commandeered me to serve in one of the continual Kaffir frontier wars which was in progress, and instantly gave me a commission as a kind of lieutenant in a border corps.