Drakensberg mountains, alone, with the clean veld wind blowing about
him and the nearest town an hour's ride away, and that but three
houses when he reached it. He had seen vivid things and it chanced he
was able to write vividly. There were twenty chapters in his novel and
he wrote them in twenty days.

The novel finished, the MS. of it was despatched to nine publishing
firms in succession, who silently but swiftly refused it. It only went
to the tenth at all because there is luck in a round number, and it
found a home because it found a free man. On the eve of its
appearance, it was hung up for a month because it was felt that
whereas the booksellers might display a book containing a certain
passage which referred to a woman's bosom, they would not do so if it
contained a plural synonym. (I offer abject apologies for these
dreadful details.) And when it finally appeared, the main portion of
the English Press cried to heaven against it, and a smaller section
clamoured for disciplinary action. For a hectic month the author, who
had simply and plainly written of things as they were, honestly
without conception that anyone existed who would doubt their truth or
the obvious necessity for saying them, sat amazed before the storm.

Now that incident, unimportant to the world at large as it is, does
afford an admirable example of that censorship which is about us at
every turn. True, in this case, the official censor remained silent.
Although prepared to read passages from Holy Scripture in the
witness-box, and challenge a denial of the facts, the author was not
called upon to do so. He had previously given slight hints of the
truth about the racial situation in South Africa in another book and
had had that volume censored out of existence, but perhaps because
this present work merely touched on morals the official censor decided