When I was six years old, on a long journey from one part of South Africa to another, our wagon outspanned at a Boer's farm and we spent a day and a night there. I must often have visited a Boer farm-house before, but this visit made a curiously deep impression on me, from which I date the beginning of that consciousness of a certain political charm about the Boer and his life, which has never left me. The orange trees before the door, the first I had ever seen, with their sweet-scented leaves; the great clean, bare "voorhuis" (front room) with its mud floors and its chairs and sofa with reimpje[2] seats; the good old mother with her good-natured smile, sitting in her elbow chair, with her coffee table at her side and her feet on a stove; the little shy children, who, as I could not speak Dutch nor they English, brought me silently their little toys and patchwork to look at and who were so anxious to be friendly (some of these children are now, I believe, languishing as political prisoners in English prisons!); the strange cool stillness of the air next morning when we rose at dawn to continue our journey; the bleating of the sheep in the kraals, where the farmer's sons had already gone to count them out; the great blue mountain behind the house, with the still deep blue shadow beneath the krantzes[3] on its top; and the farm-house becoming a small white speck with the orange trees before the door as our wagon crept away in the early light--all this made a profound impression on me; and I am conscious that I began to feel even then that charm which the still, free, simple life of the Boer on his land has since had for me. [2] Reimpje = raw leather strips. [3] Krantzes = precipices.