the environment shall not in time exert its
inevitable influence on the busy crowding English, and make them or
their sons glad to sit upon their stoeps and smoke and look out upon the
veldt with a quiet satisfaction which is unuttered and unutterable? The
Karroo and the veldt do not change except according to the seasons; they
pour their influences for ever upon those who ride across them as the
Drakensberg Mountains send their waters down upon Natal beneath their
mighty wall. And even now the busy Englishman complains that his
African-born son is lazy and seems more content to live than to be for
ever working. Each country exacts a certain amount of energy from those
who live there; as one judges from the Boer, the tax is not over heavy.

And as in time to come the great centre of interest shifts north, as
now it seems to shift, one may prophesy with some hope, certainly
without dread of such a result, that a more energetic Dutch race, and a
less energetic English one, will fuse together, and look back upon their
childish quarrels with mere historic interest. Perhaps the Dutch in
those times will become the aristocrats, as they have done in New York;
they may even see their chance of going for ever out of politics. For
they never yet sat down to the political gaming-table gladly.

BY THE FRASER RIVER

The first experience I had in regard to gold mining was in Ballarat,
when a well-known miner and business man in that pretty town took me
round the old alluvial diggings and pointed out the most celebrated
claims. These (in 1879) were, of course, deserted or left to an
occasional Chinese "fossicker," who rewashed the rejected pay dirt,
which occasionally has enough gold in it to satisfy the easily-pleased
Mongolian. I went with my friend that same day into the Black Horse
Mine, and saw quartz crushing for the first time; but, naturally enough,
I took far more interest in the alluvial workings that can be managed by
few friends than in operations which required capital and the
importation of stamping machinery from England; and Ballarat, rich as it
once was for the single miner, is now left to corporations.

One of the strangest features of an old gold-mining district is its
wasted and upturned appearance. The whole of the surrounding country is,
as it were, eviscerated. It is all hills and hollows, which shine and
glare in the hot sun and look exceedingly desolate. When, in addition,
the town itself fails and