Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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This bond, light as air, yet strong as iron, those early mothers of the Boer race could hardly have woven between the hearts of their children and the country they come from. Alone in the world, without relatives who had cared sufficiently for them to save them from the hard mercy of a public asylum, these women must have carried away few of the warm and tender memories happier women bear to plant in the hearts of their children. The bare boards and cold charity of a public institution are not the things of which to whisper stories to little children. The ships that bore these women to South Africa carried them towards the first "Land of Good Hope" that ever dawned on their lives; and the day in which they landed at Table Bay and first trod on African soil, was also the first in which they became individuals, desired and sought after, and not mere numbers in a printed list. In the arms of the rough soldiers and sailors who welcomed them, they found the first home they had known; and the little huts on the banks of the Liesbeek, and the simple boards at which they presided, were the first at which they had been able to look round and see only the faces of those bound to them by kindly ties. To such women it was almost inevitable that, from the moment they landed, South Africa should be "home," and Europe be blotted out: the first generation born of these women and the free, tieless soldiers and sailors with whom they mated, probably looked on South Africa as does their latest descendant to-day. On their lips, when they looked at the valley of Stellenbosch, or the slopes of Table Mountain, the words—Ons Land—meant all they mean on the lips of the Transvaal Boer or the Free State Burgher of to-day,—"Our Land; the one and only land we know of, and care for, wish to know of, have any tie or connection with!"