ther, the sufferings of these people were only transitory. They would
be much better off when the journey was ended and they were disposed
of--better off indeed than many a free person in civilized and Christian
lands. Besides, such races as these, low down as they were in the scale
of humanity, suffered but little. It needs imagination, refinement, to
accentuate suffering. To anything approaching such attributes, these
were utter strangers. They were mere animals. Men dealt in sheep and
cattle, in order to live, in horses and other beasts of burden, why not
in these, who were even lower than the higher animals?

This theory of their sinister occupation Hazon thoroughly indorsed.

"Depend upon it, Stanninghame," he said, "ours is the right view to take
of it--the only view. This is 'a world of plunder and prey,' as Tennyson
puts it, and we have got to prey or be preyed upon. You, for instance,
seem to have fulfilled the latter role, hitherto, and it seems only
right you should have your turn now. To cite the latest instance, all
this rotten scrip and market-rigging finished you off, and what was that
but rascality?"

"Of course, I've been plundered, swindled, all along the line, ever
since I can remember. I'm tired of that d----d respectability, Hazon. It
doesn't pay. It never has paid. This, however, does."

The other smiled significantly at the word.

"Respectability--yes," he said. "Look at your type of success, your
self-made man, swelling out of his white waistcoat in snug
self-complacency, your pattern British merchant, your millionaire
financier, what is he but a slave-dealer, a slave-driver, a
blood-sucker. What has become of your little all, swamped in those
precious Rand companies, Stanninghame? Gone to bloat more unimpeachable
white waistcoats; gone to add yet more pillars to the temple of pattern
respectability."

"That's so," assented Laurence, with something between a sneer and a
laugh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "Yet that same crowd of
respectable swindlers would yelp in horror at us and our enterprise.
'Piratical,' they'd call it, eh? A hanging matter!"

"Swindlers--no. Swindler is English for a convicted person. Yet the
percentage of the props and pillars of financial success and mercantile
respectability who, in the self-candour and secrecy of their sleepless
hours, are honestly unable to recall to mind one or more occasions when
Portland, or Dartmoor, or Simonstown, or the Kowie loomed