f class. When you come among Colonials, forget your birth and
breeding, your ancestral acres and big income, and all those things
which carry such weight in England. No forelocks are pulled for them
here; they count for nothing. Are you wide-awake, sharp, and shrewd,
plucky; can you lead? Then go up higher. Are you less of these things?
Then go down lower. But always among these men it is a position simply
of what you are in yourself. Man to man they judge you there as you
stand in your boots; nor is it very difficult, officer or trooper, or
whatever you are, to read in their blunt manners what their judgment is.
It is lucky for our corps that it has in its leader a man after its own
heart; a man who, though an Imperial officer, cares very little for
discipline or etiquette for their own sakes; who does not automatically
assert the authority of his office, but talks face to face with his men,
and asserts rather the authority of his own will and force of character.
They are much more ready to knock under to the man than they would be to
the mere officer. In his case they feel that the leader by office and
the leader by nature are united, and that is just what they want.

There are Colonials out here, as one has already come to see, of two
tolerably distinct types. These you may roughly distinguish as the
money-making Colonials and the working Colonials. The money-making lot
flourish to some extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg.
You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a
distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a
little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and
fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks,
as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low
tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always
looks as if he were hatching a swindle. There is also a curious look of
waxworks about his over-washed hands.

This is the type that you would probably notice most. The Stock Exchange
of Johannesburg is their hatching-place and hot-bed; but from there they
overflow freely among the seaside towns, and are usually to be found in
the big hotels and the places you would be most likely to go to. Cape
Town at the present moment is flooded with them. But these are only the
mere froth of the South African Colonial breed. The real mass and body
of them consists (besides tradesmen, &c., o