this hour I can see the hundreds of lines running criss-cross upon its
surface, especially those opposite to where I used to sit.

One day, several years after my father had emigrated to the Cape, the
Heer Marais arrived at our house in search, I think, of some lost oxen.
He was a thin, bearded man with rather wild, dark eyes set close
together, and a quick nervous manner, not in the least like that of a
Dutch Boer--or so I recall him. My father received him courteously and
asked him to stop to dine, which he did.

They talked together in French, a tongue that my father knew well,
although he had not used it for years; Dutch he could not, or, rather,
would not, speak if he could help it, and Mr. Marais preferred not to
talk English. To meet someone who could converse in French delighted
him, and although his version of the language was that of two centuries
before and my father's was largely derived from reading, they got on
very well together, if not too fast.

At length, after a pause, Mr. Marais, pointing to myself, a small and
stubbly-haired youth with a sharp nose, asked my father whether he would
like me to be instructed in the French tongue. The answer was that
nothing would please him better.

"Although," he added severely, "to judge by my own experience where
Latin and Greek are concerned, I doubt his capacity to learn anything."

So an arrangement was made that I should go over for two days in each
week to Maraisfontein, sleeping there on the intervening night, and
acquire a knowledge of the French tongue from a tutor whom Mr. Marais
had hired to instruct his daughter in that language and other subjects.