Groot Schuurr was outwardly the same as in the old days, and kept up in the way one knew that the great man would have wished.  We went for the same rides he used to take.  The view was as glorious as ever, the animals were flourishing and increasing in numbers, the old lions gazed placidly down from their roomy cage on a ledge of Table Mountain, the peacocks screamed and plumed themselves, and the herd of zebras grazed in picturesque glades.  Nothing was changed there to outward appearances, and one had to go farther afield to see evidences of the dismay caused by the pillar being abruptly broken off.  Cape Town itself, I soon noted, was altered by the war almost beyond recognition.  From the dull and uninteresting seaport town I remembered it when we came there in 1895, it seemed, seven years later, one of the busiest cities imaginable, with the most enormous street traffic.  The pavements were thronged, the shops were crowded, and numerous were the smart, khaki-clad figures, bronzed and bearded, that were to be seen on all sides.  The Mount Nelson Hotel, which had been opened just before the war, was crowded with them—­some very youthful, who had early acquired manhood and selfreliance in a foreign land; others grey-headed, with rows of medal ribbons, dimmed in colour from exposure to all weathers, whose names were strangely familiar as recording heroic achievements.

At that time Sir Gordon Sprigg, of the Progressive Party, was in power and Prime Minister; but he was only kept in office by the Bond, who made the Ministers more or less ridiculous in the eyes of the country by causing them to dance like puppets at their bidding.  It was in the House of Assembly—­where he was a whale amongst minnows—­that the void was so acutely felt surrounding the vacant seat so long occupied by Mr. Rhodes, and it was not an encouraging sight, for those of his supporters who tried to carry on his traditions, to gaze on the sparsely filled ranks of the Progressive Party, and then at the crowded seats of the Bond on the other side.

We were told, by people who had met the Boer Generals on their recent visit to the colony, that these latter were not in the least cast down by the result of the war; that they simply meant to bide their time and win in the Council Chamber what they had lost on the battle-field; that the oft-reiterated sentence, “South Africa for the Dutch,” was by no means an extinct volcano or a parrot-cry of the past.  It was evident that political feeling was, in any case, running very high; it almost stopped social intercourse, it divided families.  To be a member of the Loyal Women’s League was sufficient to be ostracized in any Dutch village, the Boers pretending that the name outraged their feelings, and that distinctions between loyal and disloyal were invidious.  Federation—­Mr. Rhodes’s great ideal—­which has since come rapidly and triumphantly to be an accomplished fact, was then temporarily relegated to the background;