(By a curious coincidence, while writing this on the Half-caste, there hobbled up to our window a tall Half-caste woman, to whom we had often given medicines. She stuck a letter through the window, and asked us in Taal--the only language she spoke--to read it for her. The letter had been written at the request of her second son, to inform her that he had just received a sentence of four months, the crime not being stated. It also asked her whether she had heard that his brother Jacob was free again. On inquiring what this meant, she replied that her eldest son had just served four years for attempted rape. We asked her whether she had other children. She lighted up; the watery, blue, Caucasian eyes looked at us out of the shrivelled, brown face. "I have four daughters," she said, "the eldest is living with a white mason in the Fraserburg district. I have always brought my children up well," she added proudly, "since they were so high"--indicating with her hand a child of about three years old. "I have told them, 'Have nothing to do with a black man, hold by the white.' My three youngest daughters are all prostitutes among the gentlemen of Kimberley!" Her further remarks cannot be recorded. She then asked us for more salve; and, raising her skirt, showed the wound, where a gangrenous sore had eaten away the flesh, till in some places the bone was showing. To the white woman who looks at such an object as this, deeper than any loathing--is shame. It is not the black man's sin that is staining our African sunshine, as we watch that figure amble across the yard; it is the white man's degradation. What the Boer began the Englishman finishes.) But it is not only in the existence of our lower class of Half-castes that slavery has left to South Africa a heritage of suffering. There are subjects which touch so closely the finest sensibilities of human nature that the hand shrinks from dealing with them as it might from etching a pattern on a palpitating human heart with the most delicate of instruments. Nevertheless, it is essential this matter should also be considered. There were cases in which the ordinary Half-caste did not marry into the dark race, but again into the white, their descendants becoming ultimately almost purely white. There were also cases, though they were rare,[37] in which love and genuine respect found the gulf which divides race from race not wide enough to prevent their crossing, and in which white men took as their lawful wives women of dark race. The offspring of these lawful marriages naturally remarried into the white race; and so it comes to pass to-day that there are certain white men and women, both Dutch and English, often of the greatest natural intelligence, and sometimes of great culture, wealth, and physical beauty, who have in their veins this remote trace of non-European blood.