Standing at the back-door of a farm-house once, and looking out over a little flat filled with mimosa trees in full flower while the afternoon light was filling all the valley with a haze, a powerful Boer woman stood beside us watching the scene. Not one of the most refined of her kind, sharp of tongue, and strong of hand, and unable either to read or write, the thought struck us how little of the infinite beautiful land was probably visible to her--when we looked round the woman was in tears. "Ach," she whispered, "it is a beautiful land the Lord our God has given us! When I look at it so, something swells up and up in my throat--I feel I never will be angry with the servants and children again!" There is perhaps nothing which shows more the ignorance and limitations of those of us brought up under conditions of modern artificial civilization than the common impression that these silent persons living and labouring always in contact with inanimate nature cannot perceive or comprehend it as we with larger powers of expression are able to. A man (not a Boer this time, but an English settler of the same type, a silent, uncultured hard-working man) who for thirty years had lived on the banks of a certain little stream, planting his fruit trees and ploughing his lands, was attacked at sixty by an incurable disease. Placed in an ox-wagon to be taken to the nearest hospital, his friends and neighbours accompanied him for a short distance. As the oxen's feet passed down into the little African stream which he had crossed and recrossed, and on whose banks he had laboured for thirty years, he passed his hard horned hands over his face and burst into tears and, to the astonishment of all about him, broke forth into the words of Tennyson's song:-- Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, Thy tribute wave deliver; No more by thee my step shall be For ever and for ever, repeating all the verses; a song which his children had doubtless sung about the house when they came home from school.