roughly estimated at from 250,000 to 400,000 persons.
But one rarely sees a native except along a few well-beaten tracks, and
still more rarely comes upon a cluster of huts in the woods along the
streamlets or half hidden among the fissured rocks of a granite kopje.
The chief traces of man's presence in the landscape are the narrow and
winding footpaths which run hither and thither through the country, and
bewilder the traveller who, having strayed from his waggon, vainly hopes
by following them to find his way back to the main track, or the wreaths
of blue smoke which indicate the spot where a Kafir has set the grass on
fire to startle and kill the tiny creatures that dwell in it.

Nothing is at first more surprising to one who crosses a country
inhabited by savages than the few marks of their presence which strike
the eye, or at least an unpractised eye. The little plot of ground the
Kafirs have cultivated is in a few years scarcely distinguishable from
the untouched surface of the surrounding land, while the mud-built hut
quickly disappears under the summer rains and the scarcely less
destructive efforts of the white ants. Here in South Africa the native
races seem to have made no progress for centuries, if, indeed, they have
not actually gone backward; and the feebleness of savage man
intensifies one's sense of the overmastering strength of nature. The
elephant and the buffalo are as much the masters of the soil as is the
Kafir, and man has no more right to claim that the land was made for him
than have the wild beasts of the forest who roar after their prey and
seek their meat from God.

These features of South African nature, its silence, its loneliness, its
drear solemnity, have not been without their influence upon the mind and
temper of the European settler. The most peculiar and characteristic
type that the country has produced is the Boer of the eastern plateau,
the offspring of those Dutch Africanders who some sixty years ago
wandered away from British rule into the wilderness. These men had, and
their sons and grandsons have retained, a passion for solitude that even
to-day makes them desire to live many miles from any neighbour, a sturdy
self-reliance, a grim courage in the face of danger, a sternness from
which the native races have often had to suffer. The majesty of nature
has not stimulated in them any poetical faculty. But her austerity,
joined to the experiences of their race, has contributed to mak