ranchmen or sheep-masters. They are a
slow, quiet, well-meaning hospitable people, extremely conservative in
their opinions as well as their habits, very sparing, because they have
little ready money, very suspicious, because afraid of being out-witted
by the English traders, and many of them so old-fashioned in their
theory of the universe as to object to legislation against sheep scab,
because they regard it as a visitation of Providence, to be combated
only by repentance and not by ordinary human means. The women are
usually ill-educated and often unattractive; but they have strong
characters. Nothing was more remarkable in the wars of the emigrant
Boers against the Kafirs than the courage and devotion which the women
displayed. That love of cleanliness for which their kinsfolk in Holland
are famous has vanished under the conditions of a settler's life and the
practice of using negro servants, and they are now apt to be slatternly.
These country folk live in a simple, old-fashioned way, loving solitude
and isolation, yet very hospitable, and enjoying the rare occasions on
which they meet for festivities at one another's farmhouses. Such
meetings are almost their only recreations, for hunting is less
attainable now that the larger game has disappeared, and they care
nothing for the intellectual pleasures of reading or art or music.
Education is beginning to spread among them, but it has not yet done
much to quicken their minds or give them new interests. The population
is so extremely thin, the towns so few and so small, that it is not
surprising that a people who came out from the least educated strata of
society in Holland should, under the difficult conditions of a settler's
life, have remained at a low level of mental culture. They would
probably have been still more backward, and have produced fewer men of
ability, but for the infusion of French Huguenot blood, which still
proclaims itself in the names of some of the leading families.

Compared to the Dutch, the English are recent immigrants. They have all
arrived within the present century, and few of them can point to
grandfathers born in South Africa. Partly for this reason, partly from
their desire to be unlike the Dutch, they have remained markedly
English, both in their speech, in their ideas, and, so far as the
differences of climate permit, in their way of life. Nevertheless, they
have been affected by the Dutch. They have taken from the latter the
avers