"
"When did you see them?" asked the officer.
"I see them now," Burnham answered.
"But I thought you were looking for a lost trail?"
"That's what the Boers on the kopje think," said Burnham.
In his eyes, possibly, owing to the uses to which they have been
trained, the pupils, as in the eyes of animals that see in the dark,
are extremely small. Even in the photographs that accompany this
article this feature of his eyes is obvious, and that he can see in the
dark the Kaffirs of South Africa firmly believe. In manner he is
quiet, courteous, talking slowly but well, and, while without any of
that shyness that comes from self-consciousness, extremely
modest. Indeed, there could be no better proof of his modesty than
the difficulties I have encountered in gathering material for this
article, which I have been five years in collecting. And even now,
as he reads it by his camp-fire, I can see him squirm with
embarrassment.
Burnham's father was a pioneer missionary in a frontier hamlet
called Tivoli on the edge of the Indian reserve of Minnesota. He
was a stern, severely religious man, born in Kentucky, but
educated in New York, where he graduated from the Union
Theological Seminary. He was wonderfully skilled in wood-craft.
Burnham's mother was a Miss Rebecca Russell of a well-known
family in Iowa. She was a woman of great courage, which, in those
days on that skirmish line of civilization, was a very necessary
virtue; and she was possessed of a most gentle and sweet
disposition.
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