life by a trivial common standard.  At his doorstep, though, lay the frontier of little things; he was something beyond us all, and therefore greater or less than we.  The mere pictorial value of his tall figure, the dignity of his long, forked beard, and the expectancy of his patient eyes, must have settled it that he was greater.  I was a child when he died, and remember only what I saw, but the rest was talk, and so, perhaps, grew the more upon me.

One day he died.  For years he had walked forth in the morning and back to his house at noon, a purple spot on the raw color of the town.  He had always been still and somewhat ominous, and conveyed to all who saw him a sense of looking for something.  But on this day he went back briskly, walking well and striding long, with the gait of one that has good news, and he smiled at those he passed and nodded to them, unheeding or not seeing their strong surprise nor the alarm he wrought to the children.  He went straight to his little house, that overlooks a crowded garden and a pool of the dorp spruit, entered, and was seen no more alive.  His servant, a sullen Kafir, found him in his bed when supper-time came, called him, looked, made sure, and ran off to spread the news that David Uys was dead.  He was lying, I have learned, as one would lie who wished to die formally, with a smile on his face and his arms duly crossed.  This is copiously confirmed by many women who crowded, after the manner of Boers, to see the corpse; and of all connected with him, I think, his end and the studied manner of it, implying an ultimate deference to the conventions, have most to do with the awe in which his memory is preserved.

Now, a death so well conceived, so aptly preluded, must, in the nature of things, crown and complete a life of singular and strong quality.  A murder without a good motive is mere folly; properly actuated, it is tragedy, and therefore of worth.  So with a death one seldom dies well, in the technical sense, without having lived well, in the artistic sense; and a man who will furnish forth a good death-bed scene seldom goes naked of an excellent tradition.  I have been at some pains to discover the story of David Uys; and though some or the greater part of it may throw no further back than to the vrouws of the dorp, it seems to me that they have done their part at least as well as David Uys did his, and this is the tale I gleaned.

When David was a young man the Boers were not yet scattered abroad all over the veldt, and the farms lay in to the dorps, and men saw one another every day.  There was still trouble with the Kafirs at times, little risings and occasional murders, with the sacking and burning of homesteads, and it was well to have the men within a couple of days’ ride of the field-cornet, for purposes of defense and retaliation.  But when David married all this weighed little with him.

“What need of neighbors?” he said to his young wife.  “We have more need of land—­good land and much of it.  We will trek.”