e he told me so
I knew that he was in part a Frenchman. Men so great are not easily
conquered, as we know to our cost. Why, it took quite 250,000 soldiers
and three years of strenuous guerrilla warfare to enable Britain to
defeat 40,000 or 50,000 Dutch farmers. Therefore I have personally not
the least fear of the ultimate result of the campaign against Southwest
Africa.

I went as a lad as Secretary to the Governor of Natal. That was in 1875.
Subsequently I accompanied Sir Theophilus Shepstone, one of the greatest
men that ever lived in South Africa, on his famous mission to the
Transvaal. I am now, I believe, the only survivor of that mission, and
certainly the only man who knows all the inner political history of that
event. Afterward I held office in the Transvaal, and was in the country
during all the disastrous period of the first Boer war. For instance, I
dined with Gen. Colley the night before he started on his ill-fated
expedition. I think there were thirteen of us present at that historical
dinner. Within a few weeks six or eight of these were dead, including
Colley himself, killed in the fight of Majuba, of which I heard the
guns. Of those present at that dinner party there now survive only Lady
Colley, my wife, and myself.

*Felt Like Rip Van Winkle.*

After this I left Africa, and more than thirty years went by before I
returned as a commissioner in the service of the Crown. It was a very
extraordinary experience; indeed, I felt like a new Rip Van Winkle, for
nearly all my old chiefs and colleagues were dead, and another
generation had arisen. I can only say that I was deeply touched by the
reception which I received throughout the country. It was with strange
feelings that almost on the very spot where I helped to read the
proclamation of annexation of the Transvaal, in 1877, and with my own
hands hoisted the British flag over the land, I listened to my health
being proposed by the Dutch Chief Justice of the Transvaal territory,
once more a part of the British Empire. Such was my greeting everywhere.
Three and thirty years before I had left the shores of Africa, believing
that soon or late the British power was doomed to failure and probably
to extinction there. When I left them again, six months ago, it was with
the glad knowledge that, by the united wish of the inhabitants of South
Africa, it was re-established, never again to pass away. It is a
wonderful thing for a man in his own lifetime to see a