Those were the days of hard living and hard fighting. The white man depended mainly on his gun for food. And when the little Bushman looked out from behind his rocks, he saw his game--all he had to live on--being killed, and the fountain which he or his fathers had found and made, and had used for ages, being appropriated by the white men. The plains were not wide enough for both, and the new-come children of the desert fought with the old. We have all sat listening in our childhood to the story of the fighting in those old days. How sometimes the Boer coming suddenly on a group of Bushmen round their fire at night, fired and killed all he could. If in the flight a baby were dropped and left behind, he said, "Shoot that too, if it lives it will be a Bushman or bear Bushmen." On the other hand, when the little Bushman had his chance and found the Boer's wagon unprotected, the Boer sometimes saw a light across the plain, which was his blazing property; and when he came back would find the wagon cinders, and only the charred remains of his murdered wife and children. It was a bitter, merciless fight, the little poisoned arrow shot from behind the rocks, as opposed to the great flint-lock gun. The victory was inevitably with the flint-lock, but there may have been times when it almost seemed to lie with the arrow; it was a merciless primitive fight, but it seems to have been on the whole, compared to many modern battles, fair and even, and in the end the little Bushman vanished. It, perhaps, was not _absolutely_ inevitable that all should have been as it was. If these early fore-trekkers of our land had been Buddhas or Christs, or even George Eliots or Darwins or Livingstones, the story might have been different; but so, too, would the whole history of human life have been, had those gracious individualities, which now here and now there shoot forth on the highest branches of human life, constituted its undergrowth as well--if instead of being, as they are, merely the rare leaflets which show us what the whole growth may attain to when all have grown taller! It is true that ordinary missionaries, Dutch, French, English, or German, have lived among these tiny folk for years, without suffering either injury or insult; but the fore-trekkers were not missionaries, nor thirsting to sacrifice themselves for the aborigines. They were simply ordinary, good folk, rather above than below the common European average, who had their own ends to look after; and the Bushman, being what he was, a little human in embryo, determined to have his own way, the story could take its course in no other direction than that in which it did!