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African Game Trails 
upstanding men, good mechanics, good 
masons, and Prinsloo spoke English well. 
I afterward stopped at the farm of Klop- 
per’s father, and at the farm of another 
Boer named Loijs; and I met other Boers 
while out hunting—Erasmus, Botha, Jou- 
bert, Meyer. They were descend¬ 
ants of the Voortrekkers 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 back¬ 
ward under the stress of a hard 
and semi-savage life; just as in our 
communities of the frontier, the 
backwoods, and the lonely moun¬ 
tains there are shiftless “ poor 
whites” and “mean whites” min¬ 
gled with the sturdy men and wom¬ 
en who have laid deep the founda¬ 
tions 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 nationality. 
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, and wished to avoid 
living under the British flag. Some moved 
West and some East; those I met were among 
the many hundreds, indeed thousands, who 
travelled northward—a few overland, most 
of them by water—to German East Africa. 
But in the part in which they happened to 
settle they were decimated by fever, and 
their stock perished of cattle sickness; and 
most of them had again moved northward, 
and once more found themselves under the 
