ell, these two figures; they are the representatives of a
type slowly disappearing from the Cape Colony--the race of Trek-Boers,
nomads, who for generations have had no home but their wagons, and who
live (more often than not from absolute choice) the free vagrant life of
the veldt, with their flocks and herds around them.

The man, Klaas Stuurmann, is a Boer of loose, ungainly frame. He stands
six feet one; is about fifty-two years of age; has a broad, deeply
tanned face, in which are planted two watery-blue eyes; a shock of
hay-coloured hair; and a long beard of the same uninteresting hue. He
wears _veldt-broeks_ (field-trousers) of soft home-tanned skin. He is
about the last Dutchman in Cape Colony to use these old-world garments;
but his father and grandfather wore such clothes, and they are good
enough for him. He has no socks or stockings, and a pair of rude,
home-made, hide _velschoens_ cover his feet. He has a flannel shirt to
his back, and over that a short jacket of much-worn corduroy. Upon his
head is the usual tall-crowned, broad-brimmed, felt hat, which carries a
hideous band of broad, rusty crape in memory of his deceased wife. The
man's face is dirty, to be sure; but, besides the dirt, there is a dull,
vacant, unthinking look, rather painful to see. It is the look of one
bred through dull, listless generations of men, self-banished from their
own kind, whose only interests have been in sheep and goats and trek
oxen, their only excitement an occasional hunt, or a scrimmage with
Bushmen in time gone by. Such a listless and vacant look you may see
even now in some of the more remote _dals_ of Norway, among the poorer
of the peasant-farmer folk. It is the look of men who gaze always
without a spark of interest upon the silent face of nature around them,
and who for generations have seldom exchanged an idea with their
fellows.

For 150 years Klaas Stuurmann and his ancestors have led the wandering
life of the Trek-Boer, knowing no hearth but the pleasant camp-fire, no
roof but the glaring blue of the unchanging African sky and the tents of
their wagons, no floor but the wild veldt. Many among the more settled
Dutch farmers wonder how these uneasy nomads, with their shiftless ways
and habits of unrest, first came to pursue such an existence. In the
present instance it happened much in this wise: Klaas Stuurmann's
great-great-grandfather, a restless spirit, farming near the old
settlement at Cape To