approval. He did not want to talk--especially in a clattering,
dusty railway carriage. At intervals the passengers foregathered for
meals at some wayside buffet or accommodation house,--meals whose
quality was in inverse ratio to the exuberance of the prices charged
therefor,--then each would return to his own box and smoke and read and
sleep away the little matter of seven hundred miles.

On they sped for hours and hours--on through sleepy Dutch villages,
whose gardens and cultivation made an oasis on the surrounding
flats--on, winding in a slow ascent through the gloomy grandeur of the
Hex River Poort, with its iron-bound heights rearing in mighty masses
from the level valley bottom. Then it grew dark, and, the dim oil lamp
being inadequate for reading purposes, Laurence went to sleep.

"Afar in the desert I love to ride,"

sang Pringle, the South African bard.

"Pringle was a liar, or a lunatic," quoth Laurence Stanninghame, to whom
the passage was familiar, on opening his eyes next morning and looking
around. For the train was speeding--when not slowing--through the
identical desert of which Pringle sang; that heart-breaking, dead-level,
waterless, treeless belt known as the Karroo. Not a human habitation in
sight, for hours at a stretch--the same low table-topped mountains
rising hours ahead, and which never seemed to get any closer, looking,
moreover, in the distant, mirage-effects, like vast slabs poised in
mid-air and resting on nothing. At long intervals a group of foul and
tumble-down Hottentot huts, with their squalid inhabitants--lean curs
and ape-like men; their _raison d'etre_, in the shape of a flock of
prematurely aged and disappointed-looking goats, trying all they are
worth to extract sustenance from the red shaly earth and its sparse
growth of coarse bush-like herbage. Looking out on this horrible desert,
the eye and the mind alike grow weary, and the latter starts speculating
in a shuddering sort of a way as to how the deuce anything human can
find it in its heart to exist in such a place. Yet though an awful
desert in time of drought it is not always so.

But gazing forth upon the surrounding waste, Laurence was able to read
into it a certain charm--the charm of freedom, of boundlessness, so
vividly standing out in contrast to his own cramped, narrow, shut-in
life. All the changed conditions--the wildness, the solitude, the
flaming and unclouded sun--were as a new awakening to life. Th