The Rhodes Memorial.
One day someone sat gazing at the big Devils Peak, which shadows Groote Schuur and stands like a rampart of the Citadel Mountain behind. As he gazed he became inspired; he said: 'There should be a monument to Rhodes, just there, on those steep green slopes under the Watch House, where the heavy Dutch cannon were dragged up to defend the bay.' The Rhodes trustees rose up and formed the chorus.
So began the drama of the monument.
The players were reinforced. Watts from London sent a huge bronze group, Physical Energy, which is the beginning in the game of progress. John Swan, with his wonderful head of a Michael Angelo prophet and a later Roman Emperor, Rodin of the English, came himself and drew designs for paradoxical lions.
This was our train of mind as we rode up the fir avenue of Groote Schuur bordered with blue periwinkle flowers.
BLUE HYDRANGEAS AT GROOTE SCHUUR
Home of Rhodes and a hostel for passing visitors of name and fame, it was the 'Great Barn' of long ago—the Great Barn where the 'Company's' corn, grown under such difficulties, was stored in times of plenty, that there should be food for the Company's servants, ever busy fighting off the Hottentots across the Flats, when the Batavian Directors, with great omnipotence, decreed that the homeward-bound fleet should find no room to carry rice to the vegetable settlement of Bonne Esperance. For the Company settled in the shadow, not to found an empire beyond the seas, but to 'grow vegetables for their ships.'
Groote Schuur, the great barn with its present building carefully imitative, its masses of blue hydrangeas and wisteria, white-walled terraces of plumbago and magenta bougainvillæa, and its tall pine-trees and deep, fern-banked glen.