seen rises up as in a picture before us,--from Ratcliffe Highway with its drunken sailors and hopeless women, to Monte Carlo with its princes and prostitutes; from the Champs Elysées to the Karoo; from Grosvenor Square to Bethnal Green,--there yet rises up no picture of life more healthful and full of promise for the future, more satisfying to the whole nature of man on earth, than yours in the wide plains of South Africa. We know all its deficiencies, its lack of a certain variety, the absence of certain brilliant elements which the human spirit may feed on elsewhere; and, yet, it rises up before us as something wholly strong, and virile, and full of promise. There are even times when we have felt we would rather be the little naked Kaffir children who play, fat and shining, with the kids on your kraal walls in the African sunshine than be most of the modern men and women we have known; for the life is more than meat and the body than raiment. "Hold fast, Tante! Hold fast, Oom! You have much to lose. Be careful how you exchange it. Cling to your old manners, your old faiths, your free, strong lives, till you know what you are bartering them for. "Tante, dear Tante, be not too anxious to change your old, straight, black skirt for the never-ceasing vagaries of modern fashion, that sap at the life of the modern woman as an open running tumour saps at the strength of a body. Do not be too anxious to change, for a pile of gauze or straw and textile flowers, that old black kappie of yours, that has shielded you for so many generations from the African sun and the African winds, in peace and in war, on kopje and on plain. "Believe me, if some great artist should see you as you sit there by your out-spanned wagon, in your old black dress with your infant at your breast, and the African sky above you and the still veld round you, and should paint you as you are, you would hang in the world's great galleries, and generations to come of men and women would say, 'How strong, how harmonious!' For your old black dress, and the veld and the sky, and the baby at your bosom can never go out of fashion, as the hoop, and the patch, and the tilted hat, and fashionable furniture, go; for they have that eternal dew of the morning upon them which rests on all things growing up out of nature and necessity, for use and not for show. And if it should have happened that, in the sterner moments of your life, one should have depicted you truly when, in laager or beside wagon, you stood side by side with the man who was your companion, to defend that you prized, then, believe me, that old black kapje of yours would have become a helm, and men in future generations, looking on, would say 'There were giants in those days.'