As trustee of a Highland estate, some time ago my consent was asked to the granting of a leasehold to a Scottish gentleman, who had returned from the Transvaal. The only objection the lawyer who asked the question mentioned as existing against this man was that he was said to have married a native. Some canny objectors had written a letter saying that this ought to form a bar to any grant of land to the man, though he had originally come from the district. Who was the lady? was the next inquiry. Was she a Hottentot Venus? Did she "bang her hair" in too negroid a fashion? Would she introduce among the dim lights of the North the terrible practices of her people? Would the quiet village be scandalised by strange feasts and weird howlings? No, by no means. What was she, then? Why, nothing but a nice flaxen-haired, rather squab-featured, but withal comely Boer girl! So she entered into her Highland possession, had a door "stoop," or something like a bit of raised verandah flooring put outside the entrance, but found, poor soul, that it was rather a dripping place of observation in her adopted climate. Nevertheless, the last news of her is that she is a happy, "sonsie" mother, and has some children, who don't speak Dutch as their common language, but only a few low Dutch words, with very Highland accent. But this is said to be only the case where a Scotsman marries a Boer. There is apparently something in the Scot that makes him look after his family more carefully than does the average Englishman or Irishman. It is therefore only the Scot, as it is said, both in Africa and in Canada, whose children, if he marry one of another race, do not desert the accents of their forefathers on the paternal side. As a rule the children become much what the mother is. I have seen the children of a naval man who had married an Indian woman on the Pacific Coast become almost like the small fish-eating savages around them. They were willing to do a little work for a spurt, and then relapsed into dirt and laziness. So in the north-west of Canada it is only an Orkney or Aberdeen east-coast Scot who can keep his family to civilised life, if he marry a Cree or member of any other Indian tribe. The Frenchman's children, by an Indian mother, take to hunting only. Even with the Scots in Old Canada the same rule holds good, at least wherever a Celt has married a French Canadian. There are numbers of families below Quebec, on the north side of the river St. Lawrence, whose names are Highland. They are the descendants chiefly of Fraser's Highlanders, one of the regiments employed during the war against the French in 1748-49. When the soldiers obtained grants of land on the conclusion of the war they married French-Canadian women. Their descendants now can seldom speak one word of English or of Gaelic. They speak nothing but Canadian French patois. It is the mother's influence, with rare exceptions, that tells. So it is in South Africa.