The transfer from the busy commercial cities of the Rhine mouths to the far-away periphery of the world's trade, from the intensive agriculture of small deltaic gardens and the scientific dairy farming of the moist Netherlands to the semi-arid pastures of the high, treeless _veldt_, where they were barred from contact with the vivifying sea and its ship-borne commerce, has changed the enterprising seventeenth century Hollander into the conservative pastoral Boer.

Dutch cleanliness has necessarily become a tradition to a people who can scarcely find water for their cattle.

The comfort and solid bourgeois elegance of the Dutch home lost its material equipment in the Great Trek, when the long wagon journey reduced household furniture to its lowest terms.

House-wifely habits and order vanished in the semi-nomadic life which followed.[77] The gregarious instinct, bred by the closely-packed population of little Holland, was transformed to a love of solitude, which in all lands characterizes the people of a remote and sparsely inhabited frontier.

It is a common saying that the Boer cannot bear to see another man's smoke from his _stoep_, just as the early Trans-Allegheny pioneer was always on the move westward, because he could not bear to hear his neighbor's watch-dog bark.