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At least the fact is certain, whatever else may be doubtful, that within one generation after the arrival of the Huguenot at the Cape the language spoken by the people was neither Dutch nor French, but that broken dialect we call the Taal.

If our supposition be correct, and the Taal was indeed partly formed in the way we have suggested, then that curious affection of the Boer for his little cramped dialect, which makes it second only to South Africa as the object of his passionate devotion, becomes comprehensible, and not only understandable but almost pathetic when we regard it not as a speech picked up from the group at the kitchen doorway, but as inherited from the best of his early forbears, and first shaped by the lips of the young Huguenot mother as she bent over the cradle of her half Dutch child, striving to shape her speech in the new and father tongue. If this be so, then the Taal is indeed what the Boer so often and so vociferously calls it—his "Moedertaal"; and one is bound to regard his feeling for it as one regards the feeling of a woman for her mother's old wedding-gown and faded orange blossoms—they may be mouldy and unfit for present-day use, but her tenderness for them is a matter for profound sympathy rather than ridicule.