, zur, I beed awful frowt."

Brown's preparations for departure were slow; my patience was severely
tried. But at length everything was ready. The caravan consisted of two
Scotch carts, each drawn by six oxen. With these we started on our long
journey, crossing Kabousie Nek by a road of a gradient steeper than
that of any other I have traversed in a vehicle. We were accompanied by
another strange character a man named Dixon, who had lived for many
years at the foot of the Kabousie Mountain. Dixon had been a military
tailor at Gibraltar. He had a red face and fiercely protuberant
eyebrows, a curled up moustache, and an imperial. When he became
intoxicated, as he occasionally did, Dixon grew more solemn than any of
the various judges it has been my privilege to meet. Twenty years
afterwards I saw, him at the front in one of the Kaffir wars. He must
then have been nearly seventy years of age, yet, literally, he did not
look a day older than when we first met.

We struck a bad snowstorm on the top of the Stormberg; had we not been
able to drive the oxen into a sheltered kloof they would assuredly have
perished. We shivered sleepless all night under one of the carts in a
freezing gale. Next morning was cloudless; the ranges far and near were
heavily, covered with glistening snow. A few days later we picked up
two men, who were tramping towards the diamond-fields. One was named
Beranger; I believe he was the son of a former lessee of Covent Garden
Opera House. His companion was a man named Hull, an ex-publican from
Lambeth. With these two chance companions we entered into a sort of
partnership; for some months after reaching the diggings we all worked
together.

On our way through the Orange Free State we saw immense herds of
springbuck and an occasional herd of blesbuck and wildebeeste. As we
were badly armed, very little game fell to our guns. In those days it
was lawful for travelers to shoot game anywhere along the roadside for
their own consumption; a farmer would no more think of objecting to a
stranger shooting a buck on his veld than a gardener would object to
one destroying a caterpillar.

When we reached the fields we found the "dry diggings" at Du Toit's Pan
and Bultfontein in full swing. "Old De Beers" had only been "rushed" a
few days previously. So we decided to try our luck at Bultfontein
instead of going on to the Vaal River, as we had originally intended.
We outspanned in the middle of the Du Toit's Pan "