Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/297

 vestrymen are against High Mass, but the pastor stands firm, and says he is within his rights.

—We have spent this day in the old Dutch town of Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State in the days before the Boer war. It has thirty thousand inhabitants, a little more than half of them negroes. Polly's Hotel Cecil, where we are staying, is very comfortable, and the price is only $3 a day. I came to the Hotel Cecil on the recommendation of a Boer lawyer I met on the train. He lives somewhere in the interior, and is here to attend a sitting of the supreme court. The lawyer is the first Boer I have become acquainted with; he was a Boer soldier during the war, and, being taken prisoner, was sent to India, where he remained eighteen months. The Orange Free State had no grievance against the English, but went to war because it had a defensive alliance with the Transvaal. Although Oom Paul is a famous figure in history, he was quarrelsome and unreasonable; he made many demands of the English that a proud people could not decently grant. But when the war began, the Orange Free State became the centre of hostilities, and all the men between the ages of seventeen and seventy were drafted. The English couldn't afford to lose, and they burned houses and destroyed fields as ruthlessly as did Sheridan in the Shenandoah valley. It was a terrible affair, but Oom Paul, with his excess of piety and patriotism, undoubtedly dragged an unwilling people to the slaughter. President Steyn was