His beard was quite white, but his long straight hair was still more black than grey.

The brown sallow face was deeply wrinkled and marked, but the dark brown eyes were still bright, and looked out upon the world with a kind of simplicity mingled with shrewdness, or perhaps some subtler quality.

He spoke English with a piquant lack of grammar and misuse of words.

When I travelled with him next day, almost the first thing he said to me was, "The heart of my soul is bloody with sorrow." His moderating influence on the Kruger Government is well known, and he described to me how he had done his utmost for peace.

But he also described how bit by bit England had pushed the Boers out of their inheritance, and taken advantage of them in every conference and native war.