visitors at a time to the gaol.  As a consequence, more than half failed to gain admittance.  Nor was he satisfied with this; he informed the prisoners themselves that he wished the Landdrost had issued two hundred passes instead of one hundred, so that he might let those Johannesburg people know who was ‘baas’ there.  Possibly the fact that on the previous day he had been severely rebuffed in his petition campaign may have provoked this act of retaliation.

Another instance of Mr. Du Plessis’ system was afforded by the case of an old schoolmaster, an Englishman named Grant.  He had been a teacher upon the farm of a Boer near Pretoria.  Through some difference with his employer he was dismissed; and his own version of the affair indicates that he suffered considerable injustice.  From the evidence given in the case in which he subsequently figured it appeared that in order to urge his grievance he returned to the Boer’s farm and even re-entered the house which he had formerly occupied.  He was arrested and charged with trespass, or threatening to molest his late employer and members of his family, and was bound over to keep the peace for six months and to find L50 surety for the same, failing which he should go to gaol for that period.  This seemed to be rather a harsh sentence to pass upon a man who was over fifty years of age, entirely destitute of means, of very inferior physique, and who had been charged at the instance of an individual who could certainly have protected himself against five such men as Grant.  No doubt the accused was an eccentric man, and probably a nuisance, and it is even possible that his conduct left the magistrate no alternative but to pass the sentence which he did:  it is not intended to question the justice of this part of the affair.  Having been sent to gaol, however, because he could not deposit L50, Grant was treated as the commonest malefactor in all respects but one—­he was allowed to retain his own clothing.  The unfortunate old man made a pathetic picture with his seedy clothes, tail coat, tall white hat, and worn gloves, which he punctiliously wore whenever called upon to face the authorities—­and it happened rather frequently.  He objected to being classed and herded with the thieves and murderers and others whose crimes were even more repulsive.  He protested against the class of food that was served to him.  For these remonstrances he at first received solitary confinement and even poorer diet; and later with a brutality which one can surely only find in a Du Plessis the unfortunate old man was placed in the Kaffir stocks, thrown out in the middle of the yard that he might be humiliated in the sight of all, and kept there in the fierce heat of a tropical sun for half a day.  The sole excuse for this was that he had been unruly in protesting against the treatment which he was receiving.  The spectacle excited the pity of the Reform prisoners to such an extent that even with the certainty of an insulting rebuff from the gaoler they endeavoured