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LETBB.EGT ARIS, AN OLD HOTTENTOT,
" Mild, melancholy, and sedst« he stands.
Tciidmg another's Hock iipon the fields—
His fathers onoo—whore notv the white ini
His home, and issues forth his proud c
His wnTi cyo flashes not; liin Iktlfiss hands
Lean OR (he shepherd's staff: tio more i<c »'iel<
The Libyan bow—but to the oppressor yields
Submissively his freedom and his lands."
THE annexed sketch is a portrait of an old man at Genadendal, Leveregt Aris. a pure Hottentot, about eighty
yeai-s of t^ie. There are now but few remaining within the Cape Colony of this enslaved and j)ersecuted race that
ai-e without some admixture of European or Negro blood. Tliose commonly called Hottentots are mostly Creoles and
half-castes, retaining in part only the characteristic features of the original Hottentot race. Nowhere within the
limits of the Colony are these people now to be met with existing in a tvild state. Beyond the Orange River,
however, in Great Namaqua Land, the original light-coloured races of Southern Aftica stiU enjoy their life of roving
freedom; and amidst the recesses of the Quathlarabas, and in the rocky fastnesses of the desert mountains beyond
the Gariep, the wily Bushman
Sleeps witliiii his black-browed den
In the lone nilderness."
At Gnadenthal, and several other missionary establishments, much has been done for the amelioration and benefit of
this oppressed and timid race: and the old man before us, after a Ufe of servitude and slavery, has found an asylum
where he may lay his bones in peace in the soil once his own.
AK OLD HOTTENTOT WOMAN, WITH HALF-CASTE GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN.
IIKRE is a sketch in the interior of one of the Hottentot huts at Genadendal—the oldest woman in the
settlement—so old, that she can remember when the hippopotami tenanted the adjoining river of Zonder-cinde, and
the valley l)eyond was scattered over with flocks of ostrich and hartebeeste—sitting by her luimlilc fireside, in peaceful
secui-Ity, surrounded by her children's children, even to the fourth generation. They say she numbers tiearly one
hundred summers; and despite her skeleton and bony frame, and the deep wrinkles that furrow hei- countenance,
she has worn weU tlirot.gh a life of Dutch slavery attd thraldom; and has lasted out, a solitary, saple.s trunk, to
witness the flag of freedom hoisted over the once accursed land of the Hotlentt.t and the slave. That little boy,
with the dark bright eyes, has the white man's blood flowin^r in his •
. beautiful in his ragged blanket,
His mother and his grandmother are dead, and there is only that dear old
soul of a gi-cat-ffrandmofhei- to hush
his baby head to sleep upon her knee. Youth and age
I strong contrast; a young and tender i)lant sheltering
itself beneath the fostering niin from whence it spi-ait!;.