She who has been the companion of man in peace and war will know how to find her way with him into the new fields of life and intellectual toil. And if it were possible without the intervention of a period of parasitism and enervation for the old Boer woman of the laager and the trek, who with her companion man first tamed South Africa and peopled it, to transform herself in the person of her descendant into the labouring woman in the new and complex fields of modern civilization, South Africa might boast in the future as in the past of possessing one of the most virile womanhoods that the world has seen. If the Boer woman still sits motionless in her elbow-chair to-day, when her sisters of the Old World and the New are rising to their feet to readjust their relation to life--she yet does well to sit there till her conditions of life change, for it is a throne. _Note added in 1898:_ As we were engaged in copying this article, it chanced business took us into the country. In the veld, some ten miles from the town, we saw approaching a large wagon with a team of ten donkeys. Before the donkeys plodded a small Hottentot boy of eight years. As the wagon approached we saw it was laden with wood and dried cakes of manure ("mest," kraal-fuel) for the next morning's market in the town; but what the figure was upon the front box (voorkist) we couldn't quite make out. Then it came nearer and we saw, in truth for the first time in our life in such a position, a huge Boer woman of perhaps forty. She wore a black dress made without regard to fashion with a full short skirt and short jacket. On her head she had a large white cotton kapje (sun bonnet), such as Boer women make, projecting far forward with white curtains hanging on to the shoulders. In her hand she had a wagon-whip made from a bamboo eight or nine feet long, with the plaited leather cord long enough to reach the front donkeys of the span. She sat massively upright on the front-box. We looked at her as we passed and she scowled at us from under her deep kapje with resentment which I knew meant, "Verdomde Engelse vrou, do you think I care for your ridicule!" She took her whip from her shoulder and gave a resounding clap in the air with it over the backs of the donkeys; and she went on one way and we another. But if she had known what was in our heart, we might have stopped and shaken hands. We found out afterwards that she had nine children and was the wife of a man, an invalid and too feeble to work, that they were what is known in South Africa as "bywoners," poor people living on the land of a richer farmer, and that she supported her family entirely. She would take her wagon of fuel to the next morning's market, and the little clerks and shopkeepers and women with flowers in their hats would laugh at her short black