sking their lives for.

One sight I saw which will stay with me whilst memory lasts. They had
placed me under a waggon under a mass of overhanging rock for safety, and
there they brought two wounded men. One was a man of fifty, a hard old
veteran, with a complexion as dark as a New Zealand Maori; the beard that
framed the rugged face was three-fourths grey, his hands were as rough and
knotted by open air toil as the hoofs of a working steer.

He looked what he was--a Boer of mixed Dutch and French lineage. Later on I
got into conversation with him, and he told me a good deal of his life. His
father was descended from one of the old Dutch families who had emigrated
to South Africa in search of religious liberty in the old days, when the
country was a wilderness. His mother had come in an unbroken line from one
of the noble families of France who fled from home in the days of the
terrible persecution of the Huguenots. He himself had been many
things--hunter, trader, farmer, fighting man. He had fought against the
natives, and he had fought against our people. The younger man was his son,
a tall, fair fellow, scarcely more than a stripling, and I had no need to
be a prophet or a prophet's son to tell that his very hours were numbered.
Both the father and the lad had been wounded by one of our shells, and it
was pitiful to watch them as they lay side by side, the elder man holding
the hand of the younger in a loving clasp, whilst with his other hand he
stroked the boyish face with gestures that were infinitely pathetic. Just
as the stars were coming out that night between the clouds that floated
over us the Boer boy sobbed his young life out, and all through the long
watches of that mournful darkness the father lay with his dead laddie's
hand in his. The pain of his own wounds must have been dreadful, but I
heard no moan of anguish from his lips. When, at the dawning, they came to
take the dead boy from the living man, the stern old warrior simply pressed
his grizzled lips to the cold face, and then turned his grey beard to the
hard earth and made no further sign; but I knew well that, had the
sacrifice been possible, he would gladly have given his life to save the
young one's.

A BOER FIGHTING LAAGER.

BURGHERSDORP.

Many and wonderful are the stories written and published concerning the
Boer and his habits when on the war-path