The descriptions of the wild creatures that play their parts in this little history, as well as the acts, habits, and instincts assigned to them, you may regard as true to Nature.

Young Von Bloom was a student of Nature, and you may depend upon the fidelity of his descriptions.
Disgusted with politics, the field-cornet now dwelt on the remote frontier--in fact, beyond the frontier, for the nearest settlement was an hundred miles off.

His "kraal" was in a district bordering the great Kalihari desert--the Saara of Southern Africa.

The region around, for hundreds of miles, was uninhabited, for the thinly-scattered, half-human Bushmen who dwelt within its limits, hardly deserved the name of inhabitants any more than the wild beasts that howled around them.
I have said that Von Bloom now followed the occupation of a "trek-boor." Farming in the Cape colony consists principally in the rearing of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats; and these animals form the wealth of the boor.

But the stock of our field-cornet was now a very small one.
The proscription had swept away all his wealth, and he had not been fortunate in his first essays as a nomade grazier.