In no instance has a member of this people been truly civilized. When confined in European houses and compelled to wear European clothing, they contract consumption and die. By the early settlers and the Hottentots they were supposed to be absolutely incapable of feeling, and the Boers, and even the Kaffirs, still regard them as only half-human, and probably descended from baboons.[24] They will bear resentment for long years with the persistency of many wild animals, but have also a curiously strong sense of gratitude, and are not incapable of powerful affection of a dog-like kind. [24] This is a view we have heard seriously expressed by some Kaffirs. Some years ago we came into contact with a Bushboy, who had been procured from his mother for a bottle of brandy, and who was carefully tended in the hope of civilizing and rearing him. He, however, contracted consumption. On the day of his death, his mistress seeing what his state was, bade him lie down in the little box which was the only bed he could be induced to use. Half an hour after we discovered him in the yard cleaning the knives, with the struggle of death already in his face and the rattle in his throat. Asked why he had come, he shook his head and said he could not allow his mistress to have her dinner with an unpolished knife. We took him back to his box, and gave him a sugar-stick. He curled himself up; gave a look of unutterable gratitude and affection to his mistress, gave one suck at his sugar-stick, and died--like a small wild animal--but one capable of profound gratitude and affection. These people have now almost disappeared; a few hordes in the North-West, and solitary individuals hanging about the pale of civilization, are all that is now left of them: but at the time of the arrival of the early settlers they formed a most important element in the population. Wholly distinct from both these peoples, and yet more widely divided from them in appearance and social institutions than from the Indo-Europeans, is the third order of people whom the early settlers found in South Africa.