unters, dared the unknown wilds and the dangers of the
remote regions towards the Zambesi. But still a leaven of them clung to
the old Cape Colony. The life became ever more sombre and less
alluring. The great game had gone; only the springboks and smaller
antelopes remained to remind them of the teeming plenty of the brave
days of smooth-bores and flint-locks. These Trek-Boers of the colony
sank lower in the social scale; they had to depend only on their scant
flocks and herds; their more settled and richer neighbours learned to
look upon them with dislike and even hate, for the reason that they
often, by means of their flocks and herds, carried disease--scab and
lung-sickness, and red-water--from one farm to another. And so in these
latter days the Trek-Boer of the Cape Colony is looked upon as little
better than the gipsy of Europe. Many of them are miserably poor; their
flocks are reduced and deteriorated from disease and in-and-in breeding;
their wagons are battered and dilapidated; they themselves look degraded
and sunken and miserable. Some of them burn ashes from certain of the
karroo bushes, and sell them to the settled farmers to make soap with.
Some collect salt from the pans, and with a few springbok skins earn a
trifle to eke out their wretchedness. Some few, like the Stuurmanns,
still have decent wagons and fair flocks. But in the Cape Colony they
are a declining race, and twenty or thirty years more will see the last
of them. Yet even the poorest of them still retain their pure European
blood, still lord it over their miserable native servants, and at
times--perhaps thrice in the year--still trek to the nearest village for
_Nachtmaal_ (communion). And still the great Bible, more often than not
two hundred years old, is carried in the wagon-chest and cherished. For
these Trek-Boers of Cape Colony, the unpeopled solitudes of
Bushmanland--that is, the northern portion of the divisions of Little
Namaqualand, Calvinia, Fraserburg, and Carnarvon, bordering on the
Orange River--are still a last stronghold. Here, after the rains, they
can range freely with their flocks and pursue the trekking springboks,
and live the old wild life. Elsewhere, if they halt for the night on
the farm of another, they must pay for the privilege, and a goat or
sheep or two have to be handed over in exchange for pasture and right of
water.

I have hinted at the darker aspect of the latter-day life of the
Trek-Boers of Cap