There can be no doubt but that Namaqualand will prove to be one of the great copper producing countries of the earth; and as little, I fear, that it is in all other respects one of the most unfortunate and undesirable. I have spoken to some whose duties have required them to visit Springbok Fontein or to frequent Port Nolloth, and they have all spoken of their past experiences without expressing any wish to revisit those places. Missionaries have gone to this land as elsewhere, striving to carry Christianity among, perhaps, as low a form of humanity as there is on the earth,--with the exception of the quickly departing Australian aboriginal. They have probably done something, if only a little, both towards raising the intellect and relieving the wants of those among whom they have placed themselves. But the Bushmen and the Korannas are races very hopeless. Men who have been called upon by Nature to live in so barren a region,--a country almost destitute of water and therefore almost destitute of grass, can hardly be expected to raise themselves above the lowest habits and the lowest tastes incident to man. If anything can give them a chance of rising in the world it will be such enterprise as that of the Cape Mining Company, and such success as that of the Ookiep mine. CHAPTER XVII. CONCLUSION. I have now finished my task and am writing my last chapter as I make my way home across the Bay of Biscay. It has been laborious enough but has been made very pleasant by the unvarying kindness of every one with whom I have come in contact. My thanks are specially due to those who have travelled with me or allowed me to travel with them. I have had the good fortune never to have been alone on the road,--and thus that which would otherwise have been inexpressibly tedious has been made pleasant. I must take this last opportunity of repeating here, what I have said more than once before, that my thanks in this respect are due to the Dutch as warmly as to the English. I am disposed to think that a wrong impression as to the so-called Dutch Boer of South Africa has become common at home. It has been imagined by some people,--I must acknowledge to have received such an impression myself,--that the Boer was a European who had retrograded from civilization, and had become savage, barbarous, and unkindly. There can be no greater mistake. The courtesies of life are as dear to him as to any European. The circumstances of his secluded life have made him unprogressive. It may, however, be that the same circumstances have maintained with him that hospitality for strangers and easy unobtrusive familiarity of manners, which the contests and rapidity of modern life have banished from us in Europe. The Dutch Boer, with all his roughness, is a gentleman in his manners from his head to his heels.