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The Boers are boasting that they will soon drive the last Englishman out of South Africa, and seem to regard it as a sort of general picnic. They will find out their mistake before they have done." "Still, we must not think that it is going to be a picnic our way," Chris said. "They have quite made up their minds that every Boer in Cape Colony and Natal will join them at once.
Here, then, was the nucleus around which the peaceful union of Boer and English peoples in South Africa could be achieved without bloodshed. Indeed, had Queen Victoria been represented at the Cape by Sir Alfred Milner ten years before he was appointed Governor there, many things which had a disastrous influence on the Dutch elements in South Africa would not have occurred.
A broad arid plain, swelling into stony hills, surrounded them on every side. Here and there in the extreme distance, mounted figures moved over the vast expanse Boer scouts who marked in amazement the advance of this great array. Once or twice these men gathered together, and a sputter of rifle fire broke out upon our left flank, but the great tide swept on and carried them with it.
And the fat old Boer smiled at her; and the stick he held across the door, for the goats to jump over, was a lily rod with seven blossoms at the end. When she went to the house her mistress gave her a whole roaster-cake for her supper, and the mistress's daughter had stuck a rose in the cake; and her mistress's son-in-law said, "Thank you!" when she pulled off his boots, and did not kick her.
Oh, that's the goldlined loving cup we saw in the window. Our boys have won it twice and the Caledonias have won it twice. If we get it this time, it will be ours for keeps. "Run with truck one hundred and fifty yards; take twenty-five foot ladder," and so forth and so forth, Dan O'Brien's the boy for scaling ladders. He was going to enlist in the Boer War, he hates the English so.
The frontier, marked by a barbed wire fence across the summit of the pass, must be nearly forty miles from Ladysmith, but from the cliffs above it, the little British camp can be seen like a toy through this clear African air, and Boer sentries watch it all day, ready to signal the least movement of its troops, betrayed by the dust.
In the same battle an old Boer had his first view of the quaintly dressed Highlanders, and at a distance mistook them for a herd of ostriches from a farm that was known to be in the neighbourhood, refused to fire upon them, and persuaded all the burghers in his and the neighbouring trenches that they were ostriches and not human beings.
In this manner he succeeded by the November of this year in confining the active forces of the enemy to the extreme north-east and to the south-west of the peninsula. It is doubtful if the whole Boer force, three-quarters of whom were colonial rebels, amounted to more than fifteen hundred men.
Irish sedition, whether "loyal or disloyal," Protestant or Catholic, largely vanished like the shadow of an evil dream; Indian talk of civil war and trouble disappeared; South African threats of rebellion took form in a feeble effort which melted away under the pressure of a Boer statesman and leader General Botha; the idea that Colonial Dominions were seeking separation and would now find it proved as evanescent as a light mist before the sun.
As I can recall an article in this same journal, written during the course of the Boer War, in which Ireland was likened to a "serpent whose head must be crushed beneath the heel," the Daily Telegraph's praise to-day of the Irish disposition should leave Irish boys profoundly unmoved and still ashore. There is yet another aspect of the growing stream of British emigration.
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