In the old days (and still to-day wherever in the far northern territories the old conditions subsist, and the new have not rushed in) little or no instruction was of necessity given to the children. Their mothers or grandmothers taught them the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer in Holland Dutch, as it had been taught to them, and related to them some little Bible stories; and occasionally some broken-down soldier or wandering tramp, who turned up, was hired for a few pounds a year to instruct the children. Part of his occupation consisted in treading the wool down in the bales at shearing time, and performing other kindred duties, and if he was seldom treated with much respect he more seldom deserved it. It was in the remote past, as it is in the remote northern districts to-day, an uncommon thing to find an up-country Boer who could read and write fluently, or add up a sum in simple addition exactly; and the flood of education which the exertions of the clergy, and the march of South African civilization is pouring in on them, is an innovation mainly of the last twenty or thirty years, which, rapidly as it is advancing, has not yet made itself felt among the quite primitive portions of the population. (It may be superfluous, but it may here be convenient to reiterate, that in describing the Boer, we are not referring to the nineteenth-century descendants of the Dutch-Huguenots, but to the Taal-speaking seventeenth-century men of the same blood, who largely populate our remote colonial up-country districts, but who are perhaps found most perfectly preserved in the remote portions of their own states. These folk have as little resemblance to the nineteenth-century French Dutchman of the Bovenland as the smooth-faced young clerk, who meekly measures you a yard of ribbon or velvet in a London shop, has to a wild Highland clansman, though he may have the true Macgregor or Campbell blood within his veins. Not only the virtues but the vices of the one form an antithesis to those of the other. There are thousands of cultured and intellectual English-speaking descendants of the Dutch-Huguenots, who not only have no trace of the virtue of the true Boer nor of his failings, but who know nothing of him and have never drunk a cup of coffee nor passed a night in a Boer farm-house.) The children grew up with a great respect for the Bible that lay on the little table, but seldom with the power of studying it; with a knowledge that God made the world, that Noah and his sons were saved in the Ark, that the Jews were ordered to destroy the Canaanites; and that they, the Boers, were the chosen people, and South Africa the Promised Land: but of complex modern intellectual knowledge they possessed little, nor in their quiet and peaceful life did they feel the need of any. To the outsider this life of the primitive Boer may appear monotonous and blank. But it has aspects of beauty, and rich compensations of its own.