there are formed the closest friendships our hearts will ever know,
such as are formed only in the spring time of life; there is gained
our first deep knowledge of life, and there grow up within us passions
and modes of thought we will carry with us to our graves. After years,
it may be after many years, when we return, on the walls of our study
in South Africa we still keep fastened in memory of the past the old
oar with which we won our first boating victory on Cam or Thames; and
the faces of the men who shared our victory with us still look down
at us from our walls. Not dearer to any Englishman is the memory of
his Alma Mater than to him who sits thousands of miles off in the
South, and who, as he smokes his last pipe of African Boer or Transvaal
tobacco, is visited often by memories of days that will never fade,
evenings on the river with bright faces and soft voices, long midnight
conclaves over glimmering fires, when, with voices and hearts as young
and glowing as our own, we discussed all problems of the universe
and longed to go out into life that we might settle them--they come
back to us with all the glitter and light which hangs only about the
remembrances of youth: and for many of us the memory of fog-smitten
London is inextricably blended with the all profoundest emotions, the
most passionate endeavors, noblest relations our hearts will ever know.
The steamers that come weekly to South Africa are not for us merely
vessels bringing news from foreign lands; nor do they merely bring for
us the intellectual pabulum which feeds our mental life; they bring us
“NEWS FROM HOME.”
In London houses, in country cottages, in English manufacturing towns,
are men and women whose life and labor, whose joy and sorrows our
hearts will follow to the end, as theirs will follow ours to the end,
and across the seas our hands will always be interknit with theirs. Our
labor, our homes, our material interests, may all be in South Africa,
but a bond of love so strong that six thousand miles of sea can only
stretch it, but never sever it, binds us to the land and the friends we
loved in our youth. We are South Africans, but intellectual sympathies,
habits, personal emotions, have made us strike deep roots across the
sea; and when the thought flashes on us, we may not walk the old
streets again or press the old hands, pain rises which those only know
whose hearts are divided between two lands. We are South Africans, but
we are not South Africans only--we are Englishmen also:
Dear little Island,
Our heart in the sea!
If to-morrow hostile fleets encompassed England, and the tread of
foreign troops was on her soil, she would not need to call to us; we
would stand beside her before she had spoken. This is