There is pleasant society in Johannesburg and much hospitality to a stranger. I took nearly a score of letters of introduction with me to the Rand, but one would have done as well, for you present one letter, and at the dinner which the man to whom it is addressed promptly gives for you at the Rand Club or at the Carlton you will meet several of the other people to whom you bear introductions. Through their club life and their business relations the English and Americans in South Africa are linked together in acquaintance like rings in a shirt of chain-mail, so that if a man in Bulawayo or Kimberley or Johannesburg gets to living beyond his income, or loses heavily at cards, or pays undue attention to another man's wife, they will be discussing his affairs in the club bars or on the hotel verandas of Cape Town and Durban within a fortnight. I found that nearly all of the mines on the Rand are managed by Americans, and that the mine-owners, who are nearly all English or German, preferred them to any other nationality, which struck me as being very complimentary to the administrative and mechanical abilities of our people. One of these American mine-managers drove forty miles in his motor-car so as to shake hands with me, merely because he had learned in a roundabout way that I came from the same part of New York State as himself, while another fellow-countryman, who had made a great fortune during the Boer War by contracting to wash the clothes of the British army, and received war-time prices for his work, kidnapped me from the hotel where I was staying, and landed me, baggage and all, in his home, and actually felt affronted when I tried to leave after a week.