tune." "It is thought that the Kilduncan centre has had fair trial and as the ground looks unpromising the miners have been withdrawn." "Although yielding quantities of low class ore the workings at Narrap have not so far proved remunerative. "The levels at Karolusberg have also failed to reveal anything valuable." "A good deal of preparatory work has been done at this place,”—-Nabapeep. "This may be regarded as the most promising trial mine belonging to the Company." These are all the adventures yet made except that of the Ookiep mine, but that alone has been so lucky that the yield in 1876 amounted to "10,765 tons of 21 cwt., nett dry weight, averaging 28 per cent." This perhaps, to the uninitiated mind may give but a hazy idea of the real result of the speculation. But when we are told that only £7 a share has been paid up, and that £4 per annum profit has been paid on each share, in spite of the failure of other adventures, then the success of the great Ookiep mine looms clear to the most uninstructed understanding.

There can be no doubt but that Namaqualand will prove to be one of the great copper producing countries of the earth; and as little, I fear, that it is in all other respects one of the most unfortunate and undesirable. I have spoken to some whose duties have required them to visit Springbok Fontein or to frequent Port Nolloth, and they have all spoken of their past experiences without expressing any wish to revisit those places. Missionaries have gone to this land as elsewhere, striving to carry Christianity among, perhaps, as low a form of humanity as there is on the earth,-with the exception of the quickly departing Australian aboriginal. They have probably done something, if only a little, both towards raising the intellect and relieving the wants of

those among whom they have placed themselves. But the Bushmen and the Korannas are races very hopeless. Men who have been called upon by Nature to live in so barren a region,—a country almost destitute of water and therefore almost destitute of grass, can hardly be expected to raise themselves above the lowest habits and the lowest tastes incident to man. If anything can give them a chance of rising in the world it will be such enterprise as that of the Cape Mining Company, and such success as that of the Ookiep mine.

CHAPTER XVII.

Conclusion.

I HAVE now finished my task and am writing my last chapter as I make my way home across the Bay of Biscay. It has been laborious enough but has been made very pleasant by the unvarying kindness of every one with whom I have come in contact. My thanks are specially due to those who have travelled with me or allowed me to travel with them. I have had the good fortune never to have been alone on the road,—and thus that which would otherwise have been inexpressibly tedious has been made pleasant. I must take this last opportunity of repeating here, what I have said more than once before, that my thanks in this respect are due to the Dutch as warmly as to the English. I am disposed to think that a wrong impression as to the socalled Dutch Boer of South Africa has become common at home. It has been imagined by some people,-I must acknowledge to have received such an impression myself, -that the Boer was a European who had retrograded from civilization, and had become savage, barbarous, and

unkindly. There can be no greater mistake. The courtesies of life are as dear to him as to any European. The circumstances of his secluded life have made him unprogressive. It may, however, be that the same circumstances have maintained with him that hospitality for strangers and easy unobtrusive familiarity of manners, which the contests and rapidity of modern life have banished from us in Europe. The Dutch Boer, with all his roughness, is a gentleman in his manners from his head to his heels.

When a man has travelled through a country under beneficent auspices, and has had everything shewn to him and explained to him with frank courtesy, he seems to be almost guilty of a breach of hospitality if, on his coming away, he speaks otherwise than in glowing terms of the country where he has been so received. I know that I have left behind me friends in South Africa who, when they shall have read my book or shall hear how I have spoken of their Institutions, will be ill satisfied with me. I specially fear this in regard to the Cape Colony where I can go on all fours neither with the party in power who think that parliamentary forms of Government must be serviceable for South Africa, because they have been proved to be so for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; nor with those opposed to them who would fain keep the native races in subjection by military power. I would make the Kafir in all respects equal to the white man;but I would give him no voting power till he is equal to the white man in education as in other things.

It will be brought against me as an accusation that I have made my enquiries and have written my book in a hurry. It has been done hurriedly. Day by day as I have travelled about the continent in the direction indicated in its pages I have written my book. The things

which I have seen have been described within a few hours of my seeing them. The words that I have heard have been made available for what they were worth,-as far as it was within my power to do so,-before they were forgotten. A book so written must often be inaccurate; but it may possibly have something in it of freshness to atone for its inaccuracies. In writing such a book a man has for a time to fill himself exclusively with his subject, to make every thought that he has South African for the time, to give all his energy to the work in hand, to talk about it, fight about it, think about it, write about it, and dream about it. This I have endeavoured to do, and here is the result. To spend five years in studying a country and then to come home and devote five more to writing a book about it, is altogether out of my way. The man who can do it will achieve much more than I shall. But had I ever attempted it in writing other books I should have failed worse than I have done. Had I thought of it in regard to South Africa my book would never have been written at all.

I fancy that I owe an apology to some whom I have answered rather shortly when they have scolded me for not making a longer stay in their own peculiar spots. "You have come to write a book about South Africa and you have no right to go away without devoting a day to my--" sugar plantation, or distillery, or whatever the interesting enterprise may have been. "You have only been three days in our town and I don't think you are doing us justice." It has been hard to answer these accusations with a full explanation of all the facts,-including the special fact,-unimportant to all but one or two, that South Africa with all its charms is not so comfortable at my present age as the arm-chair in my own book room, But in truth the man who has an interest

ing enterprise of his own or who patriotically thinks that his own town only wants to be known to be recognized as a Paradise among municipalities would, if their power were as great as their zeal, render such a task as that I have undertaken altogether impossible. The consciousness of their own merit robs them of all sense of proportion. Such a one will acknowledge that South Africa is large; but South Africa will not be as large to him as his own mill or his own Chamber of Commerce, and he will not believe that eyes seeing other than his eyes can be worthy of any credit. I know that I did not go to see this gentleman's orchard as I half promised, or the other gentleman's collection of photographs, and I here beg their pardons and pray them to remember how many things I had to see and how many miles I had to travel.

That I have visited all European South Africa I cannot boast. The country is very large. We may say so large as to be at present limitless. We do not as yet at all know our own boundaries. But I visited the seat of Government in each district, and, beyond the Capitals, saw enough of the life and ways of each of them to justify me, I hope, in speaking of their condition and their prospects. I have also endeavoured to explain roughly the way in which each of these districts became what it now is. In doing this I have taken my facts partly from those who have gone before me in writing the history of South Africa,-whose names I have mentioned in my introductory chapter,-partly from official records, and partly from the words of those who witnessed and perhaps bore a share in the changes as they were made. The first thing an Englishman has to understand in the story of South Africa is the fact that the great and almost unnatural extension of our colonization,