Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 1).djvu/201

 liberated from Fort Brown she must go mad. She was eloquent in favour of hard work, declaring that there was nothing else which could give a real charm to life;—but perhaps she had been roused to that feeling by knowing that there was not a job to be done upon the earth to which in her present circumstances she could turn her hand. Optat arare caballus. She told me of a son who was employed in one of the distant provinces, and bade me find him if I could and tell him of his mother. "Tell him to think of me here all alone," she said. I tried to execute my commission but failed to find the man.

I had intended sleeping at Fort Beaufort and on going from thence up the Catsberg Mountain. But I was prevented by the coming of a gentleman, a Wesleyan minister, who was very anxious that I should see the Kafir school at Healdtown over which he presided. From first to last through my tour I was subject to the privileges and inconveniences of being known as a man who was going to write a book. I never said as much to any one in South Africa,—or even admitted it when interrogated. I could not deny that I possibly might do so, but I always protested that my examiner had no right to assume the fact. All this, however, was quite vain as coming from one who had written so much about other Colonies, and was known to be so inveterate a scribbler as myself. Then the argument, though never expressed in plain words, would take, in suggested ideas, the following form. "Here you are in South Africa, and you are going to write about us. If so I,—or we, or my or our Institution, have an absolute claim to a certain