head the buffalo sprang out and came charging down at him.

Norris gave one scream of terror, and with that his nerves steadied
themselves. He knew that it was no use firing at the front of a
buffalo's head when the beast was charging. He pulled a rein and
swerved to the left; the bull made a corresponding turn. A moment
afterwards Norris swerved back into his former course, and shot just
past the bull's flanks. He made no attempt to shoot them; he held his
rifle ready in his hands, and looked forwards. When he was fifty yards
from the passage he saw the first baboon perched upon a shoulder of
rock above the entrance. He lifted his rifle, and fired at a venture.
He saw the brute's arms wave in the air, and heard a dull thud on the
ground behind him as he drove through the gully and out on to the open
veld.

The next morning Norris broke up his camp, and started homewards for
Johannesburg. He went down to the Stock Exchange on the day of his
arrival, and chanced upon Teddy Isaacs.

"What's that?" asked Isaacs, touching a bulge of his coat.

"That?" replied Norris, unfastening the buttons. "I told you I would
bring back Barrington if I found him," and he trundled a scoured and
polished skull across the floor of the Stock Exchange.

HATTERAS.

The story was told to us by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton
cutter one night when we lay anchored in Helford river. It was towards
the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly
with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a
dreary look. There was no other boat in the wooded creek and the swish
of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All the
circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story but most of
all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the
story of a man's loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness
misled him. However, let the story speak for itself.

Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never schoolmates.
Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely
sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance.
The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be
visited upon the children, overbore the prophecy. Hatteras, the
father, disorganised his son's future by dropping unexpectedly through
one of the trap ways of speculation into the bankruptcy court beneath
just two months before Hatteras, t