Living in another part of Africa, three years later, it was my duty every morning to go to a Boer farm-house, about a mile off, to fetch milk. Not more pleasant in my memory is the scent of the quince hedges I had to pass, or the rushing between its stepping-stones of the river I had to cross, than of the little daub-and-wattle house of two rooms, with its mud floors and green windows, with the good old mother, very stout, sitting always in her elbow-chair beside the little coffee-table however early I came, and the great buxom daughters bustling about, while the little bare-foot children ran off to the kraal with my pail to fill it. They were the poorest class of by-woners (persons who have no land of their own and live on the land of others), and the little front room with its mud floor was often very full of flies in the summer, but the African sunshine fell across the floor from one open door to the other; and the good old mother used to make me sit on the stove at her feet, and smiled good-temperedly at my shy attempts to answer her questions in Dutch, of which I could at that time speak only a few broken words; and sometimes she gave me a carnation or a bit of pietercillie from her garden. The little house with its inhabitants were all objects of interest and sympathy to me. But I am not at all sure that, small shy person that I was, I did not even then still regard myself as a person belonging to a quite superior race, surveying them as it were from a height with sympathetic interest. It was at this time that I began to study the history of the Boers and the story of Slachters Nek, of the valiant stand made by Bezuidenhout's wife; and the sufferings and wrongs of the old Fore-trekkers were often in my thoughts. I was convinced that, had I lived at the time of Slachters Nek, I would have saved the lives of those five men, even at the risk of my own; I would have gone to the Governor, I would have moved heaven and earth, I would have been a kind of Paladin redressing the wrongs of the Boer, and I almost regretted that I had not been born in those dark times that I might have lived for, and if necessary have died for, him. But still I did not really know the Boer; he was only a far-off object of pity and sympathy. It was some years later that I was first thrown into close personal contact with the South African Boer.