Note 72 — Chapter VII · THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BOER

A young Englishman, coming out to Africa some years ago, for the purpose of distinguishing himself by shooting some big game, and hearing there was an old Boer on a farm near by who had the reputation of having been a most noted hunter, endless lions having fallen to his gun, in addition to large game and bucks, determined to visit him. He returned much disappointed. Instead of finding the house filled with trophies of the chase, which he hoped he might perhaps purchase, he found not one skin or pair of horns in the little three-roomed house. After very much difficulty, and as a matter of politeness to the stranger, the old man was at last induced to recount one or two hunting stories. The thing which he appeared to be most proud of was a frame of everlasting flowers which a daughter of his, who had been to school, had made and placed round a cheap print on the wall. He asked the young man whether they had those flowers in his country; and, when told they had not, smiled softly to himself at the manifest superiority of South Africa. It is, of course, not only the true Boer hunter who manifests this simplicity. If the works of the great African hunter, F. C. Selous, with their unvarnished tale of occurrences, be compared with the gilded narratives of some persons who have once shot a tiger from the back of an elephant or a tree-platform, the same unconscious simplicity will be manifest, dividing the man who can do the thing from the man who desires it to be thought that he can do it.