eir bones, close
to the roadside where they fell, and bethought me of the strange
Providence through which, nearly twenty years after the event, there
was now marching past those very graves a vast avenging army on its
way to those same mountain fastnesses whence our murdered comrades of
the long ago set out on their fatal journey. Sowing and reaping are
often far apart; but there is no sundering them!

At our mess dinner that same evening the conversation turned to the
kindred, but still more shameful deed recently devised, though happily
in vain, at Johannesburg. There Cordua had indeed been out-Corduad by
a conspiracy to assassinate in cold blood all the military officers
attending some sports about to be held under military patronage at the
racecourse. About eighty of the conspirators were captured in the very
act of completing their plans. Nearly three hundred more were said to
be implicated, and being chiefly of foreign extraction were quietly
sent out of the country. It was the biggest thing in plots, and the
wildest, that recent years have seen outside Russia.

[Sidenote: _The root of the matter._]

One often wonders how it comes to pass that people so demonstratively
religious prove in so many cases conspicuously devoid of truth and
honour and common honesty; but various explanations, each setting
forth some partial contributory cause, may easily be conceived.

As among Britons, so among Boers, there are, as a matter of course,
varying degrees of loyalty to the moral law, and of sincerity in
religious profession. It is therefore manifestly unfair to condemn a
whole people because of individual immoralities. The outrageous deeds
just described may well have been in large part the work of "lewd
fellows of the baser sort," a sort of which the Transvaal has
unfortunately no monopoly, and of which the better type of Boer scorns
to become the apologist. Moreover, Johannesburg drew to itself with a
rush a huge number not only of honourable adventurers, but also of
wastrels, representing every class and clime under heaven. Many of
these were commandeered or volunteered for service on the Boer side
when war broke out, and by their lawlessnesses proved almost as great
a terror to their friends as to their foes. Young Cordua was of
foreign birth, and there were few genuine Boers among the Johannesburg
conspirators; but it was the Transvaal they blindly sought to serve;
and so on the shoulders of the whole Transvaal co