s of the
Liberal candidate. Whereupon, this old man became suddenly transfigured
in the sunlight into a devil of wrath. It was some time before I could
understand a word he said, but the one word that kept on recurring was
the word "Kruger," and it was invariably accompanied with a volley of
violent terms. Was I for old Kruger, was I? Did I come to him and want
him to help old Kruger? I ought to be ashamed, I was... and here he
became once more obscure. The one thing that he made quite clear was
that he wouldn't do anything for Kruger.

"But you ARE Kruger," burst from my lips, in a natural explosion of
reasonableness. "You ARE Kruger, aren't you?"

After this innocent CRI DE COEUR of mine, I thought at first there would
be a fight, and I remembered with regret that the President in early
life had had a hobby of killing lions. But really I began to think that
I had been mistaken, and that it was not the President after all. There
was a confounding sincerity in the anger with which he declared that he
was Farmer Bowles, and everybody knowed it. I appeased him eventually
and parted from him at the door of his farmhouse, where he left me
with a few tags of religion, which again raised my suspicions of
his identity. In the coffee-room to which I returned there was an
illustrated paper with a picture of President Kruger, and he and Farmer
Bowles were as like as two peas. There was a picture also of a group of
Outlander leaders, and the faces of them, leering and triumphant, were
perhaps unduly darkened by the photograph, but they seemed to me like
the faces of a distant and hostile people.

I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of the poll, when he
drove down our Liberal lines in a little cart ablaze with the blue Tory
ribbons, for he was a man who would carry his colours everywhere. It
was evening, and the warm western light was on the grey hair and heavy
massive features of that good old man. I knew as one knows a fact of
sense that if Spanish and German stockbrokers had flooded his farm
or country he would have fought them for ever, not fiercely like an
Irishman, but with the ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of the
Boer. I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew without
seeing it that when he went into the polling room he put his cross
against the Conservative name. Then he came out again, having given his
vote and looking more like Kruger than ever. And at the same hour on
the same night