"Is it possible!" ejaculated the vrouw, pushing the tobacco canister over to Mr. Blakeney, and pouring him out another cup of coffee. "Ah, well! I always say that gold will be the ruin of the Dutch in the Transvaal; and Paul Kruger is a great fool to allow so much mining. If I were president I would close down every gold mine, and let the country be used only for farming. The Heer Gott never meant people to dig and claw into the bowels of the earth after gold, like a lot of greedy baboons after ground nuts. But I knew Paul Kruger well in the old days. He was a greedy fellow always; greedy for power, greedy for money. I hear he is rich as a Jew man, and spends £400 a year in coffee money, for which the burghers pay him--entertaining a pack of useless folk that come flattering and fawning about him. But it will be his downfall. I know it, I know it. I always told him so. Love of money, love of power. He had better have stuck to his farming, as his old father did before him. "Your Jameson raid," she went on, "is a bad sign. It means that Paul Kruger is successful a second time. But you English can never forgive that or Majuba; and there will be a big row some day, and then Oom Paul will have to go, and we Transvaalers shall lose our country. I know it, and my husband knows it, though every one else here declares that the Boers can always beat the English. But, you see, I remember as a girl Zwart Kopjes and Boomplaats, when your folk beat ours; and I say that you have more men than we, and your turn will come some day." "Well," rejoined Mr. Blakeney, after the old lady had finished her tirade, "your people are very warlike now. I’m sorry the raid happened. It was an idiotic business, and has done a good deal of mischief. I don’t like the feeling that is rising between the two races in South Africa. I fear, with you, that it will come to a big fight some day; and when it does, the English will never rest till they have made all South Africa theirs. The Free State Boers say openly now that they will take part with the Transvaal if a struggle comes; and the gold-mining folk at Johannesburg, and Rhodes and the rest of them, are bent on forcing on a war, which I am afraid now will have to come." "Yes," said the old lady. "It’s just like a couple of boys who have bad blood between them. They will go on growling and being unpleasant to one another, and then all at once the fight begins and the blood flows. Still even that is better than perpetual miscalling and swearing at one another, for all the world like a pair of tom-cats. Better, I say, have the fight over and have done with it."