Old white men and women are still living in South Africa who can remember how, in their early days, they saw men with guns out in the beautiful woods at Newlands hunting runaway slaves. They can tell you what a mistress once did when a slave became pregnant by her master; and there are stories about hot ovens--such stories as the story of Dirk, whose master seduced his wife, and Dirk bitterly resented it. "And one day," says the narrator, "we children saw Dirk taken across the yard to the wine house; we heard he was to be flogged. For some days after we fancied we heard noises in the cellar. One night, in the moonlight, we heard something, and got up and looked out; and we saw something slipped across the yard by three men. We children dared say nothing, because my grandfather never let anyone remark about the slaves; but we were sure it was Dirk's body." There is nothing new in these stories; they are as old as the times of the Romans and Chaldeans, and older than the ruin of Nineveh which they preceded. They would be echoed by the walls of half the out-buildings still standing in Jamaica and Cuba, had they the power of speech. To pretend we have never heard them before is hypocrisy; to be surprised at them is folly; to imply that they are peculiar to South Africa and the outcome of the abnormal structure of the Boer soul is a lie. Old black men and women are still living in South Africa who remember how, as little children, they were playing on a beach in a hot land, where there were tall, straight trees that do not grow in South Africa, and how white men came and took them away. They remember the names of some of their playmates; and the "yellow food" that they used to eat, they say it does not grow here. If you look at their backs, from their necks to below their thighs they have white stripes which have been there for sixty or seventy years, and with which they will go to their graves. Neither in this is there anything peculiarly South African. No more were these people always submissive. Sometimes the human in them woke. Especially the Madagascar slaves got tired, and tried to run away. "They are a most evil-disposed people," says an old German writer, "and have always only one thought, and that is, _to escape_." "They fear nothing so that they may be free of their masters." These people looked up at Table Mountain, and at our blue African sky, and our veld with its sage-green bushes, all the world that for the rest of us has meant freedom, and which for them meant despair, and their one idea was to flee. They did not know the land across the mountains, but singly or in parties they were always running away. They were caught and brought back, and flogged or broken on the wheel, says the old Chronicle; they hardly ever escaped.