In what direction is it
your purpose to proceed?" he inquired.

"We were about to ask your advice," said Lavie. "We have turned out of
our direct way to avoid being followed by the Hottentots among whom we
have been living for several weeks, and now want to make our way as
quickly as we can to Cape Town."

"I will accompany you there," said the missionary, "if it be agreeable
to you. Until last night it was my intention to travel into the country
you have just quitted, and resume my old mission work, which I left
three years ago. But, singularly enough, I am now in the same strait as
yourself. I have been living for the last year or two in the Bechuana
country; and the idea has latterly taken possession of one of the Kaffir
chiefs, named Chuma, that I have the power of controlling the elements,
and driving away disease at pleasure."

"It is not an uncommon one, is it?" asked Lavie.

"It is common enough for impostors among the Kaffirs themselves, to
pretend to such power, and they gain a certain amount of credence from
their countrymen," answered De Walden; "but they do not often fancy that
Europeans are so gifted. The fame of a very simple cure of a Bechuana
child, which was suffering from croup, and the circumstance that a
seasonable rain, after long drought fell, while I was residing in the
Bechuana village, are, I believe, the only grounds for the notion. But
Chuma was so possessed with it, that he has repeatedly made me the most
splendid offers, if I will take up my abode in his kraal."

"I wonder you did not accept it," remarked Lavie.

"You think it would have been an opening for teaching them better
things, I suppose. But that would not have been so. I could only have
gone as a professed wizard or prophet--under false colours, in fact.
And the moment I threw any doubt on the reality of my pretensions, they
would have turned on me as an impostor, and justly too. No, I told
Chuma that I would come to him as the servant of the God who sent the
rain and the sunshine, if he would have me. But that He alone could
command these, and I had no power over them, any more than Chuma himself
had."

"And he?" pursued Lavie.

"He did not believe me, and once or twice tried to seize me, and compel
me to comply with his wishes. I was very glad when the news of the
reoccupation of the Cape by the British, offered an opening for my
return to Namaqua-land. I thought I had managed my departure so well,
that the