ys drawing nearer to its centre.

In the course of his early wanderings Orpin managed to search out Ruyter
the Hottentot robber, and so influenced him as to induce him to give up
his lawless career, and return to the colony. Ruyter drew with him
Abdul Jemalee, Booby the Bushman, and one or two others, who settled
down to peaceful occupations.

The Malay in particular--slavery being by that time abolished--returned
to Capetown, and there found his amiable wife and loving children ready
to receive him with open arms. It is true the wife was somewhat aged,
like himself, and his children were grown up--some of them even
married,--but these little matters weighed nothing in his mind compared
with the great, glorious fact, that he was reunited to them in a land
where he might call his body his own!

If Jemalee had been a man of much observation, he might have noted that
many important changes had taken place in Capetown and its surroundings
during his long absence. A new South African college had been erected;
a library which might now stand in the front rank of the world's
libraries had been collected; the freedom of the press had been largely
taken advantage of, and education generally was being prosecuted with a
degree of rigour that argued well for the future of the colony--
especially in Stellenbosch, Wellington, and neighbouring places. But
Abdul Jemalee was not a man of observation. He did not care a straw for
these things, and although we should like much to enlarge on them, as
well as on other topics, we must hold our hand--for the new and eastern,
not the old and western provinces of South Africa claim our undivided
attention in this tale.

There is no necessary antagonism, however, between these two--`East' and
`West.' Circumstances and men have at present thrown a few apples of
discord into them, just as was the case with England and Scotland of
old; with the North and South in the United States of late; but,
doubtless, these apples, and every other source of discord, will be
removed in the course of time, and South Africa will ere long become a
united whole, with a united religious and commercial people, under one
flag, animated by one desire--the advancement of truth and righteousness
among themselves, as well as among surrounding savages,--and extending
in one grand sweep of unbroken fertility from the Cape of Good Hope to
the Equator.

THE END.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Settler and