was not the President after all. There was a confounding sincerity
in the anger with which he declared that he was Farmer Bowles,
and everybody knowed it. I appeased him eventually and parted
from him at the door of his farmhouse, where he left me with a few
tags of religion, which again raised my suspicions of his identity.
In the coffee-room to which I returned there was an illustrated
paper with a picture of President Kruger, and he and Farmer Bowles
were as like as two peas. There was a picture also of a group
of Outlander leaders, and the faces of them, leering and triumphant,
were perhaps unduly darkened by the photograph, but they seemed
to me like the faces of a distant and hostile people.

I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of the poll,
when he drove down our Liberal lines in a little cart ablaze
with the blue Tory ribbons, for he was a man who would carry his
colours everywhere. It was evening, and the warm western light was
on the grey hair and heavy massive features of that good old man.
I knew as one knows a fact of sense that if Spanish and German
stockbrokers had flooded his farm or country he would
have fought them for ever, not fiercely like an Irishman,
but with the ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of the Boer.
I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew without
seeing it that when he went into the polling room he put his
cross against the Conservative name. Then he came out again,
having given his vote and looking more like Kruger than ever.
And at the same hour on the same night thousands upon thousands
of English Krugers gave the same vote. And thus Kruger was
pulled down and the dark-faced men in the photograph reigned
in his stead.