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These trivial facts are not wholly without interest as showing the possible mental attitude of the members of one society towards each other if divided by race; and they will, I think, serve to show that whatever sympathy I have felt with my fellow South Africans of other races is not the result of early bias or training.

I remember it as often a subject of thought within myself at this time, why God had made us, the English, so superior to all other races, and, while feeling it was very nice to belong to the best people on earth, having yet a vague feeling that it was not quite just of God to have made us so much better than all the other nations. I have only to return to the experiences of my early infancy to know what the most fully developed Jingoism means.

Later on, my feeling for the Boer changed, as did, later yet, my feeling towards the native races; but this was not the result of any training, but simply of an increased knowledge.

When I was six years old, on a long journey from one part of South Africa to another, our wagon outspanned at a Boer's farm and we spent a day and a night there. I must often have visited a Boer farm-house before, but this visit made a curiously deep impression on me, from which I date the beginning of that consciousness of a certain political charm about the Boer and his life, which has never left me. The orange trees before the door, the first I had ever seen, with their sweet-scented leaves; the great clean, bare "voorhuis" (front room) with its mud floors and its chairs and sofa with reimpje[2] seats; the good old mother with her good-natured smile, sitting in her elbow chair, with her coffee table at her side and her feet on a stove; the little shy children, who, as I could not speak Dutch nor they English, brought me silently their little toys and patchwork to look at and who were so anxious to be friendly (some of these children are now, I believe, languishing as political prisoners in English prisons!); the strange cool stillness of the air next morning when we rose at dawn to continue our journey; the bleating of the sheep in the kraals, where the farmer's sons had already gone to count them out; the great blue mountain behind the house, with the still deep blue shadow beneath the krantzes[3] on its top; and the farm-house becoming a small white speck with the orange trees before the door as our wagon crept away in the early light—all this made a profound impression on me; and I am conscious that I began to feel even then that charm which the still, free, simple life of the Boer on his land has since had for me.