Je quitte ce pays voulant me sauver du maudit gouvernement Britannique comme mes ancetres se sont sauves de ce diable--Louis XIV.
"A bas les rois et les ministres tyrannique! Vive la liberte!" Which indicates very clearly the character and the opinions of Henri Marais, and the feeling among the trek-Boers at that time.
Thus the record closes and the story of the Marais ends--that is, so far as the writings in the Bible go, for that branch of the family is now extinct.
Their last chapter I will tell in due course.
There was nothing remarkable about my introduction to Marie Marais.

I did not rescue her from any attack of a wild beast or pull her out of a raging river in a fashion suited to romance.

Indeed, we interchanged our young ideas across a small and extremely massive table, which, in fact, had once done duty as a block for the chopping up of meat.

To this hour I can see the hundreds of lines running criss-cross upon its surface, especially those opposite to where I used to sit.
One day, several years after my father had emigrated to the Cape, the Heer Marais arrived at our house in search, I think, of some lost oxen.

He was a thin, bearded man with rather wild, dark eyes set close together, and a quick nervous manner, not in the least like that of a Dutch Boer--or so I recall him.