it is a position simply of what you are in yourself.  Man to man they judge you there as you stand in your boots; nor is it very difficult, officer or trooper, or whatever you are, to read in their blunt manners what their judgment is.  It is lucky for our corps that it has in its leader a man after its own heart; a man who, though an Imperial officer, cares very little for discipline or etiquette for their own sakes; who does not automatically assert the authority of his office, but talks face to face with his men, and asserts rather the authority of his own will and force of character.  They are much more ready to knock under to the man than they would be to the mere officer.  In his case they feel that the leader by office and the leader by nature are united, and that is just what they want.

There are Colonials out here, as one has already come to see, of two tolerably distinct types.  These you may roughly distinguish as the money-making Colonials and the working Colonials.  The money-making lot flourish to some extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg.  You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance.  He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty.  His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard.  For the same reason he speaks in low tones.  He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching a swindle.  There is also a curious look of waxworks about his over-washed hands.

This is the type that you would probably notice most.  The Stock Exchange of Johannesburg is their hatching-place and hot-bed; but from there they overflow freely among the seaside towns, and are usually to be found in the big hotels and the places you would be most likely to go to.  Cape Town at the present moment is flooded with them.  But these are only the mere froth of the South African Colonial breed.  The real mass and body of them consists (besides tradesmen, &c., of towns) of the miners of the Rand, and, more intrinsically still, of the working men and the farmers of English breed all over the Colony.  It is from these that the fighting men in this quarrel are drawn.  It is from these that our corps, for instance, has been by the Major individually and carefully recruited; and I don’t think you could wish for better material, or that a body of keener, more loyal, and more efficient men could easily be brought together.

Many of them are veterans, and have taken part in some of the numerous African campaigns—­Zulu, Basuto, Kaffir, Boer, or Matabele.  They are darkly sunburnt; lean and wiry in figure; tall often, but never fat (you never see a fat Colonial), and they have the loose, careless seat on horseback, as if they were perfectly at home there.  As scouts they have this advantage, that they not only know the country and the Dutch and Kaffir languages, but that they are accustomed, in the rough and varied colonial life, to looking after themselves and thinking for themselves, and trusting no one else to do it for them.  You can see this self-reliance of theirs in their manner, in their gait and swagger and the way they walk, in the easy lift and fall of the carbines on their hips, the way they hold their heads and speak and look straight at you.