wn, became, like many others, tired of the petty
and exasperating restrictions of the then Batavian governor. And so he
trekked in search of fresh pastures, beyond the reach of taxes and
monopolies. He was a sportsman, and the land opening before him
disclosed the most wonderful and redundant fauna the world has ever
seen. Still carrying his flocks and family with him, the Boer wandered
from veldt to veldt, always in a country virgin to the hunter, and
teeming with the noblest game.

Year after year went by, his family grew up around him--how, he himself
would have been puzzled to explain--and still the open-air,
hand-to-mouth existence pleased him, the splendid liberty, and the free,
unfettered chase in that vast, crowded, game preserve. At the beginning
he sometimes cast his eye here and there in search of a farm, but
somehow no _plants_ suited him. He wandered ever farther in search of
his ideal, and finally the _veldt_ life had so bitten into him that he
preferred to live and die in it. If he wanted powder and lead, some
coffee and sugar, or a piece of stuff for his wife's and daughters'
gowns, or a new _roer_ (gun) for his growing lads, he had but to trek
with a load of ivory and feathers to "Kaapstad" (Cape Town), and get
what he desired. For the rest, the earth and her plenty sufficed to
him. And so the years rolled on. The old Karel Stuurmann died, and was
buried near a fountain on the wild karroo, and his sons and daughters
became Trek-Boers, or the wives of Trek-Boers, after him. For many a
year all went well: the game was still there to pursue; the land was
lonely, yet pleasant; and the _verdoemed uitlander_ [accursed foreigner]
was as yet unknown. But presently came the British, and after them
percussion-guns, and later the deadly breech-loader. The game began to
vanish, the country became more settled, and, except for the remote
wildernesses of the north-west, the Cape Colony was no longer the
Trek-Boer's paradise. Slavery was abolished, and even the native
servants, the Hottentots and Kaffirs--nay, even the captive Bushboys,
mere baboons the Boers called them, torn young from their slaughtered
parents--could no longer be treated quite as of yore. Many of these
Trek-Boers joined the emigrant farmers, and passed beyond the Orange and
the Vaal Rivers. Some of them helped to found the Orange Free State and
Transvaal Republics; some of them still pursued the old wandering life,
and, as elephant-h