anaged to save a considerable number of cattle were
not slow to make hay while the sun shone, and some of them may
probably have turned up their noses at the mere mention of the Yukon
goldfields. Prospecting for gold is a somewhat risky business, but the
Boer looks upon transactions in salted oxen as eminently satisfactory,
more especially where the buyer negotiates the risks. Nothing affords
him more pleasure than to hand over twenty or thirty oxen, and receive
in exchange twenty-five pounds per head. But, unlike the English
problem, rinderpest is not always with the Boer.

In this connection there is a story to the effect that a certain Boer
farmer discovered one day that his cattle had contracted a very
serious disease, and he was advised by the Government vet., who
happened to be passing that way, to inoculate immediately, and after
the lapse of ten days to repeat the process. When the vet. returned a
few weeks later he was surprised to learn that the majority of the
cattle had died.

'But that was impossible if you acted on the instructions I gave
you,' he said to the farmer.

'Ja!' answered the latter, 'that may be, but I didn't do what you told
me; I only inoculated once.'

'And why didn't you do it a second time?' pursued the vet.

'Oh,' replied the Boer, 'because the vrouw said I hadn't to.'

[Illustration: SHOOTING RINDERPEST OXEN.]

The Boer seldom does anything without first consulting his wife, and it
is hinted that the wives made a very bad job of the rinderpest. The
vrouw steers the ship. It is so when the whole family goes to town to
make the half-yearly purchases. In the stores the husband will be found
in deep and earnest conversation with his better half, relative perhaps
to the quantity of barbed wire or coffee or woolpacks--anything and
everything required at the time. All this would seem to point to a
plain fact, namely, that the vrouw not only excels in physical
proportions, but also in the matter of brains. There can be no doubt
about the first mentioned, and there seems to be little question about
the other as well. It is authoritatively stated that at the time of the
Boer War the women were so bitter against the English that they spurred
on the men to do things which they themselves deemed foolhardy. This
anti-English feeling seems to have been intensified since then, and it
is often jocularly remarked by Englishmen in the country that so long
as an enemy makes things square with the wo