[Illustration:  A Boer homestead]

It is necessary to reside in the Boer Republics to place one in the position of knowing something of the Boer, and a mere fortnight won’t do it.  Of course, there are Boers and Boers, as there are Englishmen and Englishmen.  There are Boers who are competent to rank with any English gentleman, and whose education and abilities are of no mean order.  Unfortunately, however, these are altogether in the minority.

The Boers are all farmers, and, according to their own statements, a poverty-stricken people.  They plead poverty before an English merchant because they fancy it will have the effect of reducing prices.  Fortunately, the merchants possess rather an accurate knowledge of such customers, and in consequence they lose nothing.  One would as soon believe the generality of Boers, as walk into the shaft of a coal mine.  He has a reputation for lying, and he never brings discredit upon that reputation.  When he lies, which, on an average, is every alternate time he opens his mouth, he does so with great enthusiasm, and the while he is delivering one lie, he is carefully considering the next.  When he can’t think of any more lies, he starts on the truth, but in this he is a decided failure.  He is afraid of being found out.  For instance, a merchant will approach a Boer respecting an overdue account.  The Boer will at once plead poverty, and speculate on how he can possibly manage to liquidate his liability.  If the merchant knows the ropes sufficiently (and the majority of merchants do), he will drop the subject for half an hour, at the end of which time he will ask the Boer if he wants to sell any cattle or produce, as he (the merchant) can find an outlet for either or both.  The Boer’s diplomacy is weak, and he falls into the trap.  He has fifty cattle to dispose of; the merchant buys them, and the overdue account, with interest, is paid.

The Boers are very superstitious in a great many things.  For instance, they regard locusts as a direct visitation from the Almighty.  When the pest settles down upon ground occupied by Kaffirs, all the available tin cans and empty paraffin tins are requisitioned, and there is a mighty noise, that ought to frighten off any respectable locust swarm; but the Boer, when he sees them coming, goes into his house and lays hold of his Bible, and reads and prays until he thinks there ought to be some good result.  The Boer is gifted with great and abiding patience (in such cases only), and, no matter if the locusts stop long enough to eat up every green blade on his farm, he will continue to study his Bible and pray.  But, as I have remarked parenthetically, it is only in cases of emergency where he evinces such a display of patience and exercises such a pious disposition.  When he is not praying, he is putting ten-pound stones in his bales of wool to be ready for the merchant’s scales, and transacting other little matters of business of a like nature.