ds
the coast on the next morning, but that about two hours after sunset
suddenly he ordered them to pack up everything and follow him. This they
did and to their intense disgust those Kaffirs were forced to trudge all
night at the heels of Dogeetah, as they called him. Indeed, so weary
did they become, that had they not been afraid of being left alone in an
unknown country in the darkness, they said they would have thrown down
their loads and refused to go any further.

That is as far as I was able to take the matter, which may be explained
by telepathy, inspiration, instinct, or coincidence. It is one as to
which the reader must form his own opinion.

During our week together in camp and our subsequent journey to Delagoa
Bay and thence by ship to Durban, Brother John and I grew very intimate,
with limitations. Of his past, as I have said, he never talked, or of
the real object of his wanderings which I learned afterwards, but of his
natural history and ethnological (I believe that is the word) studies he
spoke a good deal. As, in my humble way, I also am an observer of such
matters and know something about African natives and their habits from
practical experience, these subjects interested me.

Amongst other things, he showed me many of the specimens that he had
collected during his recent journey; insects and beautiful butterflies
neatly pinned into boxes, also a quantity of dried flowers pressed
between sheets of blotting paper, amongst them some which he told me
were orchids. Observing that these attracted me, he asked me if I would
like to see the most wonderful orchid in the whole world. Of course I
said yes, whereon he produced out of one of his cases a flat package
about two feet six square. He undid the grass mats in which it was
wrapped, striped, delicately woven mats such as they make in the
neighbourhood of Zanzibar. Within these was the lid of a packing-case.
Then came more mats and some copies of _The Cape Journal_ spread out
flat. Then sheets of blotting paper, and last of all between two pieces
of cardboard, a flower and one leaf of the plant on which it grew.

Even in its dried state it was a wondrous thing, measuring twenty-four
inches from the tip of one wing or petal to the tip of the other, by
twenty inches from the top of the back sheath to the bottom of the
pouch. The measurement of the back sheath itself I forget, but it must
have been quite a foot across. In colour it was, or had been, brigh