[37] Such as the case of Eva the Hottentot, who married in the early days Van Meerhof, and one of whose daughters married a well-to-do Cape farmer. These folks are often essentially and practically entirely Aryan; the remote strain of dark blood during seven or eight generations of white inbreeding being practically so eliminated that it is no more present than a nightmare of ten years ago is present within my brains to-day; and no more manifest than in the bull-dog who may win first prize at a show is manifested the fact that, eight generations before, his ancestral tables show a strain of spaniel blood. Nevertheless, in South Africa, difficult as it may appear for those who have only lived in Europe and who have never mingled with persons of mixed race to conceive it, the position of such individuals is often one of pain and difficulty, and the cause of as acute suffering as any which human creatures are called on to go through. Over the heads of such men and women in South Africa dangles a sword, which a twirl from the hand of the most brutal and ignorant passer-by may at any moment send to their hearts. And, as the low-bred cur, safe behind a grating, may bark with safety at the noblest mastiff passing by, so the meanest and most ill-descended beings, sheltered behind the consciousness of an unmixed Aryan pedigree, may taunt with their descent men and women the latchet of whose shoes they may not be worthy to unloose. The true anguish of the position lies in the fact that so strong is the Aryan prejudice against colour, that it affects the individuals themselves; a taunt with regard to dark ancestry is always felt by the person against whom it is directed as the most cruel and unanswerable of blows, the extent of their silent suffering being measured by the fact that as a rule no reply is ever attempted, and that by their nearest friends it may not be referred to. It may be doubted whether, even within the families themselves which are so situated, the fact of such descent is ever openly discussed, as men in a chamber where one is dying seldom use the word death--the thing itself is too near. It is, moreover, on the most sensitive side of human nature that suffering is often inflicted on such men and women. It is on the side of the sex affections, and whenever the question of marriage arises, that men and women who have perhaps never felt their disabilities before are made to realize them, by reluctance on the part of those they desire, or of their friends, that there should be a mingling of the blood; it is then that the ancestral shadow looms large.