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He had looked forward to having Desmond to himself; and lo! his friend was seven thousand miles away on the veldt, not on the Hill. "You are not keen," said Desmond. On the day of the Goose Match, Saturday, September 30th, Scaife came down to Harrow to take leave of his friends. Already, John noted an extraordinary difference in his manner and appearance.
A Boer out on the veldt would not be likely to possess more than the hat he wears, but a fellow living in such a house as this would be safe to have a variety for different sorts of weather. At any rate I must try." He took off his boots, and then stole up to the front door and turned the handle noiselessly.
For months Pretoria has been our beacon, and at first it seemed quite an impossibly long way off. Looked at from Bloemfontein, across 300 miles of dreary veldt and rugged kopjes and steep-banked rivers, and allowing for the machinations and devilments of ten or fifteen thousand Boers, our arrival here did seem a vague, indefinite, and far-off prospect.
That hunter pursued a vast white bird with silver wings, sailing in the everlasting blue." "Everlasting bosh!" said I; "there is no bird of the kind on the veldt." "That bird was Truth," says the Stranger, "and, judging from the anecdote you tell me about the Babyan woman and the Zulu medicine- man, it is a bird YOU don't trouble yourself with much, my friend."
Gradually the first wild fury spent itself, and though the storm continued the sky seemed to lift somewhat, to recede as if the swollen clouds were being drawn upwards again. In the glimmering lightning the veldt shone like a sea. The water must be deep in the hollows, and he hoped none of the sheep had been caught.
I have been told that President Kruger was on this historical trek, a Voor-looper, or little boy who guides the leading oxen. Round Kimberley the country presented a very different appearance, and here we saw the real veldt covered with short grass, just beginning to get burnt up by the summer's heat. Our host, Mr. J. B. Currey, a name well known in Diamond-Field circles, met us at the station.
The spoor was judged to be at least four hours old, so there was no use putting the dogs on it. Then presently it disappeared. On the dead grass of the bordering veldt there was nothing to show which way the lion had gone. But there was a chance a small one, yet still a chance that the beast was lying up near by in the shade of a thorn tree.
Our annexation of Natal had been by no means definite, and it was they and not we who first broke that bloodthirsty Zulu power which threw its shadow across the country. It was hard after such trials and such exploits to turn their back upon the fertile land which they had conquered, and to return to the bare pastures of the upland veldt.
All told, over seven thousand Canadians crossed half the world to share in the struggle on the South African veldt. The Canadian forces held their own with any in the campaign.
This, or these, made a strange, primitive pleasure that I had known in Australia, in Texas, even in a farm upon the edge of a wild Westmorland moor. My senses informed my intellect. I shook hands with the creatures of the veldt, for I was of their tribe. Even my feet trod the earth pounded by the mules, the horses and the oxen, with a sensation that was new and old.
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