is paid in sovereigns, and half in goods bought at the buyer's store; the transaction seldom varies.

Another source of trouble to the Boer is a race of small lawyers' agents stuck about the country. They are not lawyers, but clerks who have picked up a smattering of law in an office, and then go out on their own account, acting as jackals to the town office, and as often as not picking up jobs for themselves. These men have to live, and do so by getting up all sorts of small cases, swearing affidavits, and so frightening the old Boers into paying up rather than risk the dreaded uncertainty of a law case.

Most Boers have two farms, one on the high veldt for summer use, the other in the lower country for winter feeding. These low-lying farms are situated in what is called the bush veldt, and supply grass for the cattle when frost and snow have killed it off in the higher lands. Natives abound in the neighbourhood of these bush veldt farms; the grazing-ground is often their property, and black-mail is paid them for its use. As often as not these farms consist only of grasslands; little or no cultivation goes on; houses are rarely met with. About the end of April, the Boers who have been living on their farms on the high veldt, pack their waggons, shut up their houses, and trek with their families and stock to the bush veldt. There tents are pitched-often a couple of waggons drawn up parallel to each other are covered in with a sail-cloth, and form the family dwelling, and the pleasant picnic begins. The weather is glorious, rain is unknown; there is little work to do other than herding the cattle, and that can be done by the farmer's children or Kaffir boys; game can be had at the tent-door: it is a real picnic, lasting till the rains set in

towards the end of September, and cover high land and low alike with green. Then the waggons are repacked, the oxen inspanned, and the old home on the high veldt once more inhabited. The consequence of this annual migration is, that as long as it lasts, the country is at rest; agitators have to go like the rest; the Boers are scattered far and wide, engaged in looking after their stock, living in the midst of Kaffir tribes, and it is just as well to let them alone and keep about their own tents. They have no time for politics; mass meetings will do when they get back to their own houses in the neighbourhood of the recognised centres of agitation; more than all, politics will spoil the holiday which every one is determined to enjoy ;-so the country is at rest.

And this well-known peculiarity of the Boers has led, possibly intentionally, to the circulation of the report that the country was rapidly settling down, that the ferment and agitation of the past six months had died out, and that contentment was spreading right and left. Every year these reports have been put forth, probably sent home, and the public mind set at ease by the assurances of those who were in a position to know how matters progressed. The calm that followed the late storm was due entirely to this absence in the bush veldt, and not to any particular contentment with the terms of the Convention, or the labours of the Royal Commission.

I am sure that, before these pages will be read, the noisy politics in vogue amongst the Boers last March will be resumed. Whispers already increase. No one will accept the Convention except as far as it falls in with his own interests. Resolutions against the payment of the indemnity are loudly expressed; "the Volksraad may ratify it, but we won't pay." "We have beaten the

English," they say; "it is the English must pay us, not we them.”

The wife of a leading Boer goes into an English store in Pretoria and chooses an armful of goods, which she walks off with, saying, "My husband beat the English in the war, and this is my share of what you've got to pay as beaten people."

Say others: "What! agree to the Convention-to a set of rules binding us like slaves in Russia! Never! We fought you once and beat you, and we will fight you again rather than do it."

The point contained in the reply of the Royal Commission to the natives, who asked to be told if it was true what the Boers said, that they had beaten the English, and were answered that we had not been beaten, only a few small outlying bodies of men having been engaged, was too subtle for the native mind, or for the Boer mind either. To both of them, to the latter especially, the fact remains that we chose to attack them on three occasions, picking our own time, and bringing with us as many men as, for all they knew to the contrary, we considered sufficient, and on each occasion were defeated and driven back with comparative ease. We told them that these were but at tacks by small bodies of men; that close at hand we had enough to wipe the Boers out of the Transvaal; but we made peace instead. Why didn't we wipe them out? Because we couldn't. Why did we make peace? Because we should have been beaten again if we had not. And this is the firm belief of ninety-nine of every hundred Boers, not in the Transvaal only, but in the Free State and the old colony. Mr. Gladstone may put it down to his newly coined word "blood-guiltiness;" but the Boer is a man brought up in a practical school, and he looks to common

sense. No wonder, then, that he does not see his way to paying anything like an indemnity. The feeling that they have beaten us is universal, and expressed in so unmistakably an offensive and contemptuous manner, that it is hard for Englishmen to listen to it without resentment. There was a great deal of truth in Sir Theophilus Shepstone's saying that the Boers had been chaffed into fighting. They had been so twitted about their cowardice, that when they found out they were not the cowards they had been told they were, they lost their heads, and were ready, as the Americans say, "to whop creation."

In ordinary wars, when peace has been declared, the two combatants become the best friends: brave men are proud to shake hands with brave men who had lately been their bitterest enemies. In the Crimea, I remember that the occasion of an armistice for a few hours to bury the dead was eagerly looked forward to. Out came the grey-coated Russians from their lines, mixing with our redcoats, exchanging bits of food, their only word in common the universal "Johnny" while our officers found in the Russians highly educated gentlemen, speaking our language fluently, and only leaving for their works with profound regrets, and much hand-shaking and hat-raising.

In the Transvaal a Boer meets the English soldier with an imprecation, and a scathing sentence in Dutch to the effect that he is a d-d rooi batzee, whom he has licked.

What said an educated Boer, one of their generals, who went to Potchefstroom with the second garrison as guide, or hostage, or what not? An English farmer asked him, on meeting him along the road, why the troops were going back to the town? "To pick up

their lost honour!" was the answer of this admirable Boer, who a few months previously had been commandant of the force against one of the beleaguered garrisons, which he failed to take.

A second Boer, also a general in one of the investments, an energetic young man, well educated, and formerly in Government employ, drove up his waggon of mealies for sale to the camp which he had tried in vain to take a little time before; and on the conversation turning to the incidents of those days, burst out in Dutch, with a sneer and a gesture of contempt, "Oh, we beat you-don't talk to me !" And yet the debate on the matter in the House was strung with sentences about the "high courage" of these people; their "noble struggle for liberty;" their "God-fearing natures;" their "fitness for independence."

The general impressions about the country and its people, which those at home get hold of, are likely to be rudely dispelled on close acquaintance. They will find the whole of South Africa, as we know it, is almost treeless. There is a fringe of trees along the coast, patches of bush widely scattered in kloofs and on hillsides, and a few large forests in the old colony; but this want of trees is intensified in the Transvaal. There you may travel a hundred miles without seeing a tree; you can ride all day and see but one stream, which will call to mind an English brook; cliffs and hills are rare, except where there are too many of them; the farmhouses are miles apart, and are seldom more than ugly cottages, with low roofs of galvanised iron-so low as to escape notice altogether, but for the clump of blue-gum trees generally near. There will be a few acres of land not far off, ploughed up; through the middle will run the

stream or bog, as the case may be, from which the farmer gets water; round it will be a stone wall to keep the oxen out. Nearer the house will be a garden with a row of peach-trees in it; the whole establishment looking better from a distance, unless many broken bottles, empty tins, and the refuse of years are thought matters of ornament to a tumble-down place, with windows of four small panes of glass, and a family of pigs, curs, fowls, and children all scrambling in the dirt together.

The Transvaal has its pretty spots, wooded and watered; but they are few and far between, and seldom lie on the highroads. And the highroads :-Imagine a series of rolling swells of barren grassland, some many miles, others a few hundred yards in breadth, and across these a wandering track which, it is plain to see, has been cut by waggons, winding just as the oxen traced it when they dragged the first waggon along the sward: a bit of dirty tape thrown down carelessly on the veldt, and not even pulled tight. In the bottoms between the swells runs a marshy spruit, the presence of water only to be detected by the greater greenness of the turf-none of our English streams brawling over stones; and here the track widens out into a hundred paths. The passage of a few waggons churns the spruit into a swamp, deep with black mud; stagnant pools of water cover up the mudholes; water-weeds choke the more solid parts; in a hole a little higher up lies a dead ox, the distended carcass showing partially above the water; on the bank opposite lies a second, the bones half picked by vultures. But the swamp across the road turns the next waggons off the track, and they cut one for themselves generally higher up the valley; others stray further away

still in search of firm ground, so by degrees the highroad disappears in a network of wheel-tracks many hundred yards wide, the black swamp cutting through the middle. Then the road rises interminably till the top of the swell is gained, and the traveller gets view in monotony unequalled. Everywhere long rolling swells, brown or green, according to the season; in the distance hills showing rarely; kops rounded and misty. Nearer, the veldt is strewn with bones of buck or oxen, gleaming white; a herd of antelope is scattered on the green patch on the sky-line; while dotting the road at frequent intervals. are Idead horses, mules, or oxen, in every stage of contortion and decay. An ox, waiting to die of lung-sickness, has been abandoned, and stands sadly patient against the blue beyond. There is no other living thing for miles; now and again a waggon creeps into sight, and passes you after a long time, its Dutch driver scowling darkly. The picture is not inviting. I do not say that there are none but this. There are spots where the road runs for miles between hills that look like heaps of stones piled up by giants, or through patches of mimosa-trees very pleasant to the eye; but the first picture is the commonest, and is not distorted by a hair's-breadth. One thing which strikes outsiders as strange, is the number of farms held by one man. A claim lately sent in by a loyal subject for compensation included, amongst other items, 110 farms. Now the average size of a Transvaal farm is 6000 acres, so the claimant must have had some 700,000 acres of land; and I puzzled my brains as to how it was possible to amass so much land in one hand. An old settler gave me the clue. It appears, under the Dutch system, an inhabitant of the Transvaal, after one year's residence,

was entitled to a farm; so shopboys, labourers, and other small men, found themselves possessors of a farm before they knew what to do with it. There were legal measures to be taken to secure the title; law costs time and money; and the new-comers, if they had the last two, had seldom enough knowledge to tackle the first, so they let their right drop. But your landspeculator was watching, and next day came down with an offer of money to buy up the dormant claim. The price was accepted and the speculator got the farm. As little as five shillings has been known to buy one, and so it can be accounted for how one man could hold more than a hundred.

The Native question has played a prominent part in the late Convention, and heads are shaken, and surmises made, that the native will relapse into slavery, now that the Boers are again the masters. But I do not think that things will ever be as bad, or a tithe as bad, as these croakers make out. The native is well able to take care of himself; all have guns; the authority of the chief is so paramount that he has only to give the order, and a "commando" of all his tribe will start to do his bidding. The independent native does not fear the Boers; he knows that they can shoot better than he can, are a superior race, and do not mind killing black people who are troublesome;, but he also knows that he can surprise the Boer's cattle or sheep, steal his horses, and perhaps, if the worst comes, set fire to his farmhouse, and assegai his vrow and children. And this the Boers know just as well. So there is an armed neutrality between the two races, to the mutual advantage of both, which is likely to be kept up.

That atrocities against natives have been committed by Boers is undoubted, but they are solitary

instances, and should not be laid to the charge of the race as wholesale acts.

The case of the chief Maraba I have heard quoted as an instance of Boer cruelty, and of the inability of the Boer Government under which it happened, to punish such. Maraba was a loyal chief who had a couple of horses which a Boer living near had long coveted, and at length demanded. The demand was refused, on which the Boer "commandeered" forty men of his acquaintance, surrounded the chief's kraal, and shot every man that came out. Maraba was shot through both thighs, and fell; when his devoted men formed a ring round him, and covering him with their shields, were all killed with him. The Boers then divided the women and children, the instigator of the massacre driving off the horses and cattle as his share; and of this no notice was taken.

Not long ago I found the skeleton of a native lying unburied at a short distance from a town in the Transvaal, and on speaking about it that evening, was told by one of the townspeople that it was probably a man who had given information to the English during the war, and had been murdered for his pains. "I believe it is so," he added; "because I saw a Dutchman leading a native towards the place where the body lies, with a rein tied round his neck."

During the war I have watched through glasses a Boer deliberately sjambook a native until the wretch ran out to fetch in some horses which had strayed under the English fire, and which the Dutchman did not dare fetch in himself.

But these are isolated cases, though repeated far too often of late, and are not typical of Boer treatment of the native in general. I would say that the Boer does

better for his native than the ordinary colonist does for him in Natal. The Boer gets him as a boy, and teaches him to drive a waggon, and herd cattle, makes him one of his family to some extent; (I have seen a sick Boer sitting on his bed surrounded by a couple of friends and several Kaffirs, all talking and smoking together ;) teaches him his own language, clothes and feeds him, but gives him very little money. A common dodge is to engage a Kaffir for a term of, say, three years, promising him at the end of the time an ox in payment of his work. All goes swimmingly till only three months of the time has to be worked out, when the Boer begins such systematic ill treatment, that the Kaffir is glad to run away, and lose his ox, rather than submit to it.

The

The Boer looks upon a Kaffir as a creature just superior to his oxen, to whom money is of no use-one who should work and be happy; and as a rule, a Boer's servants appear fairly contented. Slavery did exist to a large extent, and on a very limited scale does so still; but it is not slavery such as English people understand by the term. slaves were mostly children sold by their parents, deserted, or destitute; and their slavery consisted in living in a Dutch house instead of in a Kaffir kraal. In both they have to work, in both they get the same kind of food, in both can indulge in their one recreation, marriage. A mistake was made when the Royal Commission called up the natives to hear its terms without allowing them to say a word in reply. The native likes talking more than anything. He considers it his right; and having heard what the Commission had to say, he expected to be allowed to exercise his right. Let him have his say, and he would have gone away quite contented. The English, in whom he has every confidence, would