The home of the President of the South African Republic is an unpretentious dwelling, built of wood and on one floor.  There is a little piazza running across the front, upon which he is frequently seen sitting, smoking his pipe of strong Boer tobacco, with a couple of his trusted burghers beside him.  Two armed sentinels stood at the latch gate.  I hurried through the entrance.  A negro nurse was scurrying across the hall with a plump baby in her arms.  A young man with a pleasant face met me at the sitting-room door and invited me to enter.  It was an old-fashioned parlour, furnished with black horse-hair, glass globes, and artificial flowers.  A marble-topped centre table supported bulky volumes bound in pressed leather with large gilt titles.  There were several men already in the room, Boers.  Those nearest the door I saw regard me with a scowl.  I was a woman from the enemy’s camp.  At the further end of the long room sat a large sallow-skinned man with long grizzled hair swept abruptly up from his forehead.  His eyes, which were keen, were partly obscured by heavy swollen lids.  The nose was massive, but not handsome.  The thin-lipped mouth was large and flexible, and showed both sweetness and firmness.  A fine mouth!  He wore a beard.  It was President Kruger.  He was filling his pipe from a moleskin pouch, and I noticed that his broad stooping shoulders ended in arms abnormally long.  We shook hands, and he continued to fill and light his pipe.  Mr. Grobler, the pleasant-faced young man, grandson and Secretary to the President, observing that I was trembling with fatigue and suppressed excitement, offered me a chair.  We sat opposite each other, the President in the middle.  I spoke slowly, Mr. Grobler interpreting.  This was hardly necessary, President Kruger answering much that I said before it was interpreted.  I could understand him perfectly from my familiarity with German and especially Platt-Deutsch.

I explained that I had not come to talk politics.  ‘No, no politics,’ interrupted the President in a thick loud voice.  Nor had I come to ask favour for my husband, as I felt assured that the honesty of his motives would speak for themselves at the day of his trial; but I had come as a woman and daughter of a Republic to ask him to continue the clemency which he had thus far shown, and to thank Mrs. Kruger for the tears which she had shed when Johannesburg was in peril.

President Kruger relaxed a little.  ‘That is true, she did weep.’  He fixed me with his shrewd glance.  ‘Where were you?’ he asked abruptly.

‘I was in Johannesburg with my husband.’

‘Were you not afraid?’

‘Yes, those days have robbed me of my youth.’

‘What did you think I was going to do?’

‘I hoped that you would come to an understanding with the Reformers.’

His face darkened.

‘I was disappointed that the Americans went against me,’ he said.