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I cannot have been more than four years old when a Boer family outspanned their ox-wagon on the veld near our mission house. As I was walking past it a little girl of about my own age, wearing, like myself, a great white cotton kapje, climbed off the trap at the back of the wagon and came towards me holding out her hand. In it was a little fistful of dark-brown sugar, a treat to up-country children in the wilds where sweetmeats were rare. She held it out to me without saying a word. I was too polite to refuse to take it, but, as soon as I had gone a few steps, I opened my hand behind me and let it drop. To have eaten sugar that had been in the hand of a Boer child would have been absolutely impossible to me. Often, in later years, I have seen those two small figures standing there in the African afternoon sunshine in their great white kapjes, as in a way allegoric of the whole relation between the Anglo-Saxon and the Boer in South Africa.

It was about the same time that a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, but a Scotchman by descent, came to spend a night at our station. The accommodation of an up-country mission house is limited, and I had to give him up my bed. On the night following when bedtime came I inquired if fresh sheets had been put on my bed; on being told they had not and that the clergyman had only slept in them one night and I might well use them, I absolutely refused to get in. Nothing, I said, would ever induce me to sleep between sheets a Dutchman had slept between. It was in vain it was protested he was not a Dutchman though called a Dutch minister; I was resolute and passed the night on the outside of the quilt.