These men, whose mothers brought them forth kneeling upon the red sand amid the bushes at the wagon-side, under the blue African sky, with little more aid than the wild buck receives when she bows herself to bring forth her desert young--women who knew nothing of the tinsel and luxuries of life, who were content to bake their children's bread in some scooped-out anthill, and who, when for months or years there was no bread, fed their households with the wild buck's flesh, which they had prepared with their own hands; who, in time of danger, stood side by side with their husbands and sons, and when the enemy attacked, again and again, were found kneeling on the front box of the wagons, reloading the guns, and urging on sons and husbands to resistance and even death, as their Teutonic ancestresses had done in Germanic forests eighteen hundred years before--these men, born of such women, and whose first view of life was of the red sands and wide skies of an African plain; who, before they could speak, watched with half-comprehending eyes the loading of guns and the capture of game, and who, long before they were adult, could track the wild beast and mark the path of strayed cattle by the smallest sign upon the sand; who, when they travelled alone, needed nothing but a few strips of dried flesh, or a lump of unleavened bread stuffed into their bags, and a saddle on which at night to rest their heads as they slept under the stars; to whom every South African bird and beast was familiar; for whom every plant had its name, and every change in the atmosphere or the earth its understood significance; to whom every new South African plain on which they entered was a fresh home; and who, when they died, were put under the red sand, on which they first saw the light, and left in the plain with a pile of stones over them in the mighty solitude they had never feared while alive--these men, and the women who bore them, possessed South Africa as no white man has ever possessed it, and as no white man ever will, save it be here and there a stray poet or artist. They possessed it as the wild beasts and the savages whom they dispossessed had possessed it; they grew out of it; it shaped their lives and conditioned their individuality. They owed nothing to the men of the country, and everything to the inanimate nature about them! The civilization they had carried away with them from their homes in the West, they may slightly have lost; but they gained a knowledge as real as it was intimate of the land of their adoption.