unded by the mules, the
horses and the oxen, with a sensation that was new and old. Why did not
spurs jingle on my heels? I felt strong and once more a man. So feels
the Boer, and so does he love, but he cannot even try to communicate the
incommunicable. For, after all, the secret is like the smell of a flower
that few have seen. Its odour is not the odour of the rose, not that of
any lily, not that of any herb; it is its own odour only.

What is the difference, then, in those who ride the high Texan plateaux
or scour the sage-bush plains of Nevada, or follow sheep or cattle in
the salt bush country of the lingering Lachlan? There is much
difference; there is little difference; there is no difference. The
great difference is racial, the small difference is human, the lack of
any difference is animal and primaeval. In all alike, in any country
where spaces are wide, the child that was the ancestor of the man arises
with its truthful unconscious curiosity and faith in Nature. Here it may
be that one gallops, here one trots, here again one walks. But all alike
pull the bridle and snuff the air and find it good, and see the grass
grow or dwindle, and watch the stars and the passing seasons, and find
the world very fresh and very sweet and very simple.

NEAR MAFEKING

To a man who has lived and travelled in the United States of America and
the not yet United States of Australia, there is one characteristic of
South Africa which is particularly noticeable. It is its oneness as a
country. And this oneness is all the more remarkable when we take into
consideration its racial and political divisions. A bird's-eye view of
America is beyond one; a similar glance at the seaboard of Australia
from Rockhampton even round to Albany (which is then only round half its
circle) gives me a mental crick in the neck. But in thinking of Africa,
south of the Zambesi, there is no such mental difficulty. Even the
existence of the Transvaal seemed to me an accident, and, if inevitable,
one which Nature herself protests against. Some day South Africa must be
federated, but if any politician asks me, "Under which king, Bezonian,
speak or die," I shall elect (in these pages at least) to die.

But though this disunited unity seemed to me a salient feature in
cis-Zambesian Africa, it was the differences in that natural ring fence
which attracted most of my attention as a story-writer even as a
story-writer who so far has only written one ta