g the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy, I was
frozen to the spot with terror. The black door, which I thought no more
of than the lid of an empty box, began slowly to open, impelled from
within by a human hand. And President Kruger himself came out into the
sunlight!

He was a shade milder of eye than he was in his portraits, and he did
not wear that ceremonial scarf which was usually, in such pictures,
slung across his ponderous form. But there was the hat which filled the
Empire with so much alarm; there were the clumsy dark clothes, there was
the heavy, powerful face; there, above all, was the Kruger beard which
I had sought to evoke (if I may use the verb) from under the features
of Mr. Masterman. Whether he had the umbrella or not I was too much
emotionally shaken to observe; he had not the stone lions with him, or
Mrs. Kruger; and what he was doing in that dark shed I cannot imagine,
but I suppose he was oppressing an Outlander.

I was surprised, I must confess, to meet President Kruger in
Somersetshire during the war. I had no idea that he was in the
neighbourhood. But a yet more arresting surprise awaited me. Mr. Kruger
regarded me for some moments with a dubious grey eye, and then addressed
me with a strong Somersetshire accent. A curious cold shock went through
me to hear that inappropriate voice coming out of that familiar form.
It was as if you met a Chinaman, with pigtail and yellow jacket, and he
began to talk broad Scotch. But the next moment, of course, I understood
the situation. We had much underrated the Boers in supposing that the
Boer education was incomplete. In pursuit of his ruthless plot against
our island home, the terrible President had learnt not only English, but
all the dialects at a moment's notice to win over a Lancashire merchant
or seduce a Northumberland Fusilier. No doubt, if I asked him, this
stout old gentleman could grind out Sussex, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk,
and so on, like the tunes in a barrel organ. I could not wonder if
our plain, true-hearted German millionaires fell before a cunning so
penetrated with culture as this.

.....

And now I come to the third and greatest surprise of all that this
strange old man gave me. When he asked me, dryly enough, but not without
a certain steady civility that belongs to old-fashioned country people,
what I wanted and what I was doing, I told him the facts of the case,
explaining my political mission and the almost angelic qualitie