Explore "Thirty Years in Australia" by Ada Cambridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
All my recollections of the first home, and the one succeeding it, embrace the figure of a friend who was virtually of the family while we lived in them. He has so long been dead that I may with propriety refer to him more fully than I can speak of his contemporaries yet living, and it is a particular pleasure to do so in view of his nationality and of the times in which I write. For he was a Dutchman -- and everything, almost, that a man should be. If he did no good for himself in Australia -- his birth and training were against that -- he did much for his country within the compass of his little sphere. He gave some of us a faith in and a respect for it that nothing in the South African struggle has been able to impair. I have been British throughout the war to the marrow of my bones, but in the worst of times have had to bear in mind that our veldt foe comes of the stock which produced that perfect gentleman.
I have not otherwise compared them, but I can never think meanly of any Dutchman after knowing him.