over-gorged with the products of a material civilization? For, it may never be overlooked, that the intensity of human enjoyment does not vary as the intensity of the stimuli; but with the sensitiveness and power of response of the nerves concerned. As the youth obtains a more enjoyable exhilaration from his first glass of wine than the drunkard from his bottle, and the child from his sweetmeat than a gourmand from his dinner--so our African Boer, in common with all who lead a severely simple life, knows probably more of intense enjoyment than is compassed by a hundred men seeking always for new sensations and new stimulations. Is not the human soul a string which may soon be strung so tight and struck so often that it refuses to vibrate at all and ends by hanging limp; and the human life is a very small cup, where all beyond a certain amount poured into it runs to waste? Through the course of a long life, the man who employs himself on the race-course or on the Stock Exchange, and the woman who passes from theatre and ball-room to race-course and hunting-field in search of enjoyment, probably never truly enjoys what the Boer feels as he looks out over his door in the early morning, with his coffee cup in his hand, and sees the grey dawn breaking across his own land; nor knows what the Boer woman knows when she sits peaceful on the step of the door with her baby sucking at her bosom, and sees the sunshine shimmering over the bushes and landscape she lives with. These things the worn dwellers in cities do not know of. It may be asserted that our appraisement of the joys of Boer life is made from the standpoint of the much-cultured person whose highly active nervous system responds to a small stimulus, that in reality the South African Boer cares no more for the blue sky over his head than if it were a piece of blue rag pinned out above him; that the mysteries of the mighty daily cycle of nature which passes before his eyes, and which he has to watch whether he will or no, are no more to him than the lighting and putting out of candles; that the red sand and the brown stones of the kopjes and the little karroo bushes beneath which he will at last sleep have no value for him than as a substance he can walk over, build his house with, or give his stock to eat; and that Nature, with her complex and subtle speech, has no power of reaching his heavy consciousness. But this is not true.