PAYING FOR HIS WHISTLE.

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can be guilty of such crimes. There was not long ago a forge near Strydoms Spruit, a little river on the Pretoria road, where a white girl of good family was brutally ill-used by her brother, and compelled to labour as a blacksmith's help. This unfortunate creature eventually became mad, and has been seen tied up, hungry, to a willow-tree, while her screams pierced the air. Death, I have been told, subsequently released her from her sufferings. Such foul treatment of a woman, and that woman the fellow's sister, had never previously been heard of amongst the primitive, orderloving, mother-revering farmers. They could hardly conceive it possible that earth could shelter such a monster as this inhuman brother. I have been told that they have been additionally shocked since by seeing the same man or his brother-a leader of ton--received into governing circles, and placed amongst the new rulers of their land.

That the Boers have vices and strong prejudices I do not deny. Some of these give rise to comical incidents, showing at once their simplicity and their weakness.

I remember long ago, some farmers at Nacht-maal—the communion service of the Dutch Church-thronged into a store to make purchases after their usual fashion. One of them who had bought a box of tea, open, and out of which a few pounds had been taken as a sample, became enamoured of a fine bar of lead lying on the counter. With a rapidity which, nevertheless, did not escape the eyes of the storekeeper, he popped it into the tea-chest, which had been already weighed. When he was settling up, however, pretending to discover some defect in the weighing, the counterman reweighed the case; and as he charged 4s. 4d. per lb. for tea, the Dutchman (who of course could not draw attention to the nine-pound bar he had thrust into it) had the pleasure of paying at that rate for the lead.

The principal evil amongst them seems to be their system of too early marriages. Young people are not unfrequently beginning life as married men and women at the period when an Englishman's apprenticeship more often commences. They take on themselves the cares of a family, and all the troubles of domestic life, at almost incredibly early ages, sometimes beginning the world with very scanty

means, and having to labour in much the same way as their fathers did during the original settlement, for many long years before they can gain any approximation to the comforts they enjoyed in the paternal homes. This early domesticity, no doubt, has in some directions excellent results, but it unfits many young men for war and border service, weakening terribly the available force of the farming population. Many of the girls are extremely pretty, and I have found beauties amongst the Boers quite as much in demand as amongst more favoured nations. I have known a young girl whose manners, self-possession, and education would have been creditable to the daughter of people of a far higher class in life. She could dress well and dance well, and was as virtuous and amiable as any young lady in Europe. She married among her own people; and I am not the least ashamed to say that many Europeans, including myself, seemed to have been very sorry for it. Many of the elder Boer ladies are not uncomely. Even in the wild neighbourhood of Lydenberg itself there are some to be seen bearing traces of beauty of no ordinary character, and whose lives are useful, adorning and cheering the homes of their husbands and children.

The men, as has been remarked by many previous writers, are splendid specimens of humanity-far over the middle height, powerful, robust, and inured to hardships and long travel; simple and temperate, they are the material of which, with proper care, a far-seeing man would essay to build up a nation. They are called parsimonious and mean, but for my part I feel inclined to commend them for frugality and thrift, rather than to despise them for their avoidance of luxury. They are essentially colonists and settlers. They look for no home outside South Africa; and in this, I am persuaded, consists their great excellence as a colonising people. A European entering into South Africa almost invariably directs all his exertions to the making of what he considers a sufficient sum with which to return to his old home this too frequently leads him to acts of questionable morality. But South Africa is the home of the Boer. He is ever and always the domesticated South African settler; and therefore, as a rule, we find him a farmer and

a herdsman, a flockmaster or a minister of the Dutch Church --but seldom or never a storekeeper or a middleman.

In connection with these middlemen and their influence on political questions I shall have something to say when I deal with trade in a later chapter. In this, I have tried to confine myself to the Boers and their ways.

I have said before that the Dutch are, in religion, a narrow-minded people. This was exhibited in a peculiarly strange form, during the late war, in the Kruger's Post laager. In the little fort was an English storekeeper named Glynn, whose daughters had a piano, on which they would occasionally play "dance and other profane" music. This was a source of great annoyance to their pious neighbours, who in many respects resemble our own early Puritans. It was requested that the piano should be silenced, as the music might tempt the anger of Heaven, if persisted in, during a time of war and trial. If a girl in the laager (a defended encampment) were frivolous or light in her conduct, she was liable to be arrested and brought for trial before the fathers of the Church, from whom she might receive a severe caution, or even the punishment of removal. I have not heard, however, that this authority had to be at any time enforced against any of the young ladies, whose conduct in confined quarters and crowded barracks, exposed to many temptations during the war, was thoroughly and entirely creditable to their religious training.

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CHAPTER III.

FIRST SECOCOENI WAR.

Secocoeni's people-Gold-The outbreak-Misunderstood piety-Mistaken impressions-A Bushman's stratagem.

SECOCOENI, chief of the Bapidi, the son of Sequati, as I have more fully explained in another chapter, occupies a very rugged and barbarous district in the far north-east of the Transvaal. This reserve, by treaty with Sequati his father, should be bounded on the south and south-east by the Steelport River, and would comprise the district (including the Lulu Mountains) confined in the angle between that stream and the Oliphants River, into which it flows. By the Boundary Treaty, armed men were prohibited from crossing the Steelport River, lest they should disturb relations on either side. Later on, the chief, following a policy not dissimilar to that which marked the course of the formation of other and greater Kafir nations, and especially of the Amandabele, sought, by receiving refugees under his protection, to increase his tribal power and territorial influence. In this way he added to his hereditary tribe a body of men who had quarrelled with the Amaswazi. The chief of these refugees-Umsoet-brought about 300 warriors with him. Besides these there came Mapolaners, Knobnose Kafirs, Cannibals, Mambeyers, and other small knots of men from broken tribes, or sections that had split off from greater tribes, having quarrelled with their supreme chief. Each of these fragments, seeking refuge with Secocoeni, marched in under the guidance of its own chiefs and headmen, under whose government their new protector permitted them to remain. He

AN UNHEALTHY DISTRICT.

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gave them land and fixed them along the outposts, and in places where they could protect the more exposed portions of his own mountainous and difficult country. These gradually formed a chain of defence, extending from the Drakensberg along the hilly country by the Origstadt and Speckboom, past the south point of the Lulu to Mapoch, a chief whose strong position almost impinges upon the main road from Middleburg to Lydenberg. As the chief thus increased the number of his people, he was favoured in his project for extending his territory, by natural circumstances, which conspired to force back from the "treaty boundary line" the European farmers living closest to it. The border lands, which may generally be taken to mean the whole country between the main transport road—from Middleburg to Pretorius's Kop, viâ Pilgrim's Rest-and the Steelport River, consist of Bushveld, the habitat of fever of a malignant description, and are unhealthy during the greater part of the year, not only for stock but for men. In the valley of Origstadt, a town formed by the Boers was long since entirely abandoned by them-not in consequence of Kafir aggression, but because the settlers had been twice decimated by fever. There was no family resident in that valley into which death had not made its way. Some perished entirely. The same thing occurred along the whole border line, and the farmers tracked out to what is known as the Highveldthe great, bare, but healthy and excellent pasture-lands forming the plateau of the Transvaal proper. It is unnecessary for me here to go at great length into the distinction of Highveld and Bushveld. It is sufficient for the purpose of this narrative to state that northward and eastward from Lydenberg, Bushveld and Lowveld are convertible terms, and that the prevalence of sickness has hitherto caused hundreds of farmers, with their families, to quit the lower and more bushy country, and go to the higher, cooler, treeless regions which they had neglected to occupy on their first migration into the country. This enabled Secocoeni, without actual hostilities, to fill up with his new allies and dependants lands on the Transvaal side of the treaty line. The tribes or fragments of tribes to which he gave lands were invariably better fighting men than were his own sub

C