frigate,
who drove the Boers back and eventually made terms with them. The Boer
gave me the whole account in detail, but it might only weary the reader
were I to write it. He praised the courage of the English, but said
that they were not slim (cunning) enough for the Kaffirs and Boers.

The Boers have generally a question to ask, or a story to relate. They
gave me one or two very interesting accounts of the interior, and I was
at last asked to tell an adventure of some kind. I did not think that I
was likely to amuse my hearers much; for if I related some of my African
adventures and experiences they would have thought them as ridiculous as
I did the following. When returning from a rough voyage of
seventy-eight days from the Cape, a custom-house searcher came on board
our ship at Gravesend, and tried to awe us with the dangers that he
there met during a strong easterly wind. "Ah!" said he, "when it blows
hard, the sea gets rather lumpy here, I can tell you!" He was a
cockney, and this had been the limit of his travels.

I had, however, wonderful things to tell, and was obliged to be cautious
how I related them, lest my veracity should be called in question: all
my precautions were, however, useless. A young Boer, totally
illiterate, and more ignorant than the generality of these people, was,
in his own opinion, a very clever, sharp sort of fellow, who could not
easily be imposed upon.

My story was not about herds of antelopes consisting of thousands, of
attacks made on troops of elephants or buffaloes, or of lions carrying
off horses from under the very eyes of their owners. I simply wished to
tell the Boers what sort of a place London was, which I mentioned as
about half its real size, that I might not astonish too much. I gave
them a description of the large shops, and at last tried to describe
Saint Paul's Cathedral. I told them that it was so large that at least
four thousand people could stand at the same time inside the building;
and that it was so high that if your own brother happened to be at the
top, and you at the bottom, you would not be able to recognise him. I
was at once told by the young Dutchman that this could not be true; my
host, however, came to the rescue, and said that he himself had seen the
building, and it was, in reality, even larger than I had stated. The
Dutchman would not have it so, at any price, but asked, with a knowing
look, "if the wind ever blew in my country," or "