as stood in my grandfather's house away in the Old Colony. The noise
pleases him and sends him to sleep, reminding him of the days when
he courted me and I used to strum upon that spinet with one finger.
Therefore I am dictating this history that he may have plenty of it, and
that Suzanne may be kept out of mischief.

There, that is my joke. Still there is truth in it, for Jan Botmar, my
husband, he who was the strongest man among the fathers of the great
trek of 1836, when, like the Israelites of old, we escaped from the
English, our masters, into the wilderness, crouches in the corner yonder
a crippled giant with but one sense left to him, his hearing, and a
little power of wandering speech. It is strange to look at him, his
white hair hanging upon his shoulders, his eyes glazed, his chin sunk
upon his breast, his great hands knotted and helpless, and to remember
that at the battle of Vechtkop, when Moselikatse sent his regiments to
crush us, I saw those same hands of his seize the only two Zulus who
broke a way into our laager and shake and dash them together till they
were dead.

Well, well, who am I that I should talk? For has not the dropsy got hold
of my legs, and did not that doctor, who, though an Englishman, is no
fool, tell me but yesterday that it was creeping up towards my heart?
We are old and soon must die, for such is the will of God. Let us then
thank God that it is our lot to pass thus easily and in age, and not
to have perished in our youth, as did so many of our companions, the
Voortrekkers, they and their children together, by the spear of the
savage, or by starvation and fever and wild beasts in the wilderness.
Ah! I think of them often, and in my sleep, which has grown light of
late, I see them often, and hear those voices that none but I would know
to-day. I think of them and I see them, and since Suzanne has the skill