never yet heard.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE STORY OF JACOBA STEYN.

Jacoba Steyn lives with her brother Hans and his wife and numerous
family on a remote farm far up in Waterberg, to the north-west of the
Transvaal. She is, although now well on in middle age, a spinster--a
rather remarkable circumstance among the women of the South African
Dutch. For Jacoba is, as Dutch Afrikanders go, not uncomely, and few
Boer women of her looks and condition in life escape, or desire to
escape, from the joys and cares of matrimony. You would never think, to
look at Jacoba Steyn nowadays, that there was much of romance or
sentiment in her nature. She is now a stout spinster of forty-seven,
thick and square of figure, and, as she takes her _kapje_ off, you may
note the grey threads showing thick in her dull brown hair. Yet Jacoba
cherishes within her broad breast a very real and very tender romance,
as all her relations and some few of her friends know.

Thirty years ago there came into the life of this staid, sober-minded
Boer woman a bright gleam of passion, which ever since has illumined her
quiet existence. That romance will never fade from her heart. Its
tender memory shapes and tinges almost every act of her working,
everyday life. It softens those somewhat rude asperities of manner
which the average Boer housewife usually exhibits. It gives that kindly
content which shines forth from the blue eyes and upon the homely
features of spinster Jacoba. All the ragged, rough, and noisy crew of
children--there are nine of them--of her brother Hans call in Tant
Jacoba for the settlement of quarrels and the drying of tears. Her
renown as a peacemaker has a far wider field than that of her somewhat
sharp-tongued sister-in-law, the mother of all this unruly brood. Until
ten years ago many of the neighbouring Boers of Waterberg--bachelors and
widowers--still cherished the hope and belief that Jacoba Steyn was to
be induced into the bonds of matrimony. Jacoba was still on the right
side of middle age; she was far from ill-looking in the eyes of a Dutch
farmer; a certain air of refinement, peculiar to herself, distinguished
her from all her fellows. And she had flocks and herds of her own,
running upon her brother's veldt, as well as some good tobacco "lands,"
which yielded no mean profit each year. The few cows and goats set
apart for Jacoba in her infancy, according to the ancient patriarchal
Boer plan, had increased and mu