SOUTHERN AFRICA. 
401 
the beautiful lines of the poet will equally apply as to that of 
the once happy peasantry of Switzerland : 
** Though poor the Kaffer's hut, his feasts thoagh small, 
<^ He feels his little lot the lot of all, 
Sees no contiguous palace rear its head 
*' To shame the meanness of his humble shed." 
That the Booshuanas are of the same race of people as the 
Kaffers on the sea-coas.t is a position that will scarcely admit of 
a doubt ; but though they are not by any means so fine a body 
of men in point of personal qualifications, they seem to have 
stepped beyond them in the arts and habits of civilized life. 
They are not, like the eastern Kaffers, invariably black ; some 
being of a bronze colour, and others of nearly as light a brown 
as the Hottentot. Their hair grows to a greater length and is 
more inclined to be straight ; some of the women wore their 
locks combed over the forehead. Their houses are totally different 
from those of any other tribe yet discovered in Southern Africa; 
and the pointed tent-shaped roof may perhaps be considered as 
an additional argument in favour of their Arabic origin. Their 
pastoral life, their feeding principally on milk, their hospitahty 
to strangers, their practice of cnxumcising male children, and 
the general cast of he countenance, are all Arabic. Little stress, 
how^ever, is to he \lA on the features of a single horde on a vast 
continent, abounding wdth natives of every tint of colour. When 
a party of Dutch boors, in the year 1790, undertook a jour- 
ney to the eastward for the purpose of discovering the spot 
M'here the Grosvenor Indiaman w^as supposed to have l)een 
lost, they met with a tribe of people situated on the sea-coast, 
in the very same parallel of latitude with some of the 
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