far
as the writings in the Bible go, for that branch of the family is now
extinct.

Their last chapter I will tell in due course.

There was nothing remarkable about my introduction to Marie Marais. I
did not rescue her from any attack of a wild beast or pull her out of a
raging river in a fashion suited to romance. Indeed, we interchanged our
young ideas across a small and extremely massive table, which, in fact,
had once done duty as a block for the chopping up of meat. To this hour
I can see the hundreds of lines running criss-cross upon its surface,
especially those opposite to where I used to sit.

One day, several years after my father had emigrated to the Cape, the
Heer Marais arrived at our house in search, I think, of some lost
oxen. He was a thin, bearded man with rather wild, dark eyes set close
together, and a quick nervous manner, not in the least like that of a
Dutch Boer--or so I recall him. My father received him courteously and
asked him to stop to dine, which he did.

They talked together in French, a tongue that my father knew well,
although he had not used it for years; Dutch he could not, or, rather,
would not, speak if he could help it, and Mr. Marais preferred not to
talk English. To meet someone who could converse in French delighted
him, and although his version of the language was that of two centuries
before and my father's was largely derived from reading, they got on
very well together, if not too fast.

At length, after a pause, Mr. Marais, pointing to myself, a small and
stubbly-haired youth with a sharp nose, asked my father whether he
would like me to be instructed in the French tongue. The answer was that
nothing would please him better.

"Although," he added severely, "to judge by my own experience where
Latin and Greek are concerned, I doubt his capacity to learn anything."

So an arrangement was made that I should go over for two days in each
week to Maraisfontein, sleeping there on the intervening night, and
acquire a knowledge of the French tongue from a tutor whom Mr. Marais
had hired to instruct his daughter in that language and other subjects.
I remember that my father agreed to pay a certain proportion of this
tutor's salary, a plan which suited the thrifty Boer very well indeed.

Thither, accordingly, I went in due course, nothing loth, for on the
veld between our station and Maraisfontein many pauw and koran--that is,
big and small bustards--were to be found, to s