38 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



I met other Boers while out hunting Erasmus, Botha, 

 Joubert, Meyer. They were descendants of the Voortrek- 

 kers with the same names who led the hard-fighting farmers 

 northward from the Cape seventy years ago; and were 

 kinsfolk of the men who since then have made these names 

 honorably known throughout the world. There must of 

 course be many Boers who have gone backward under the 

 stress of a hard and semi-savage life; just as in our com- 

 munities of the frontier, the backwoods, and the lonely 

 mountains, there are shiftless "poor whites" and "mean 

 whites," mingled with the sturdy men and women who have 

 laid deep the foundations of our national greatness. But 

 personally I happened not to come across these shiftless 

 "mean white" Boers. Those that I met, both men and 

 women, were of as good a type as any one could wish for 

 in his own countrymen or could admire in another nation- 

 ality. They fulfilled the three prime requisites for any race: 

 they worked hard, they could fight hard at need, and they 

 had plenty of children. These are the three essential 

 qualities in any and every nation; they are by no means 

 all-sufficient in themselves, and there is need that many 

 others should be added to them; but the lack of any one of 

 them is fatal, and cannot be made good by the presence 

 of any other set of attributes. 



It was pleasant to see the good terms on which Boer and 

 Briton met. Many of the English settlers whose guest I 

 was, or with whom I hunted the Hills, Captain Slatter, 

 Heatley, Judd had fought through the South African war; 

 and so had all the Boers I met. The latter had been for 

 the most part members of various particularly hard-fighting 

 commandos; when the war closed they felt very bitterly, 



