themselves to a weary banishment. Day by day she grew
paler and more listless; her old fire and spirits had left her and could
not be recalled, and, by the time they reached the marshes of the
Okavango, she was utterly unfit to cope with the deadly fever of that
unhealthy land.

At last, thin and worn and weak, the merest shadow of the once proud
Transvaal beauty, she could travel no longer. They outspanned under a
big Motjeerie tree, and there, tended by her husband and the still
faithful Hottentot, Andries, and with Barend's hand in hers, she passed
from life into the unknown.

Hendrika Van Staden sleeps, as sleeps many another stout and heroic.
Dutchwoman who has yielded up her soul in Africa, in the dim wilderness,
beneath the great Motjeerie tree, amid whose spreading oak-like leafage
the wild doves of the forest coo soft requiem. In the still solitudes
around wander free and undisturbed the great game of the veldt she loved
so well. And at night to the fountain near her grave come the tall
giraffe, the mighty elephant, the painted zebra, the sinuous tawny lion,
the tiny steinbok, and many another head of game, to quench their
thirst.

What fitter resting-place could be hers? And if, indeed, Hendrika erred
in the supreme trial of her life, what mother, what true woman, would
have done otherwise? Who shall judge her? who cast a stone?

CHAPTER SEVEN.

A LEGEND OF PRINCE MAURICE.

It was Christmas-time at the Cape, when many a man and woman of British
blood, jaded by the sun and drought of an up-country life, flocks down
to the sea. Cape Town and her charming suburbs were crowded; and the
pleasant watering-places of Muizenberg and Kalk Bay were thronged with
folk dying once more to set eyes on the blue ocean, to inhale the fresh
breezes, and to remind themselves of their own sea-girt origin. From
every corner of South Africa--from the old Colony, the Free State, the
Transvaal, from far Bechuanaland--they had come. You might see
sun-scorched wanderers from the far interior, hunters, explorers,
prospectors, and pioneers. Some had come to restore broken health; some
to taste again the sweets of civilisation, to spend hard-won money; or,
perchance, an enthusiast might be seen who had been attracted south a
thousand miles and more by the week's cricket tournament on the Western
Province ground at Newlands.

Cape Town was at her best and bravest. Adderley Street was as crowded
as Bond Street in June