ory--and swaying, jerking, pounding, into ruts
and holes, the chariot drew up like a hurricane blast before quite an
imposing-looking building at the corner of the Market Square. Having
paid off the lunatic of the whip and stood him a drink, Laurence engaged
a room, and wondered what the deuce he should do with himself if delayed
here any time. For the glimpse he had obtained of the place seemed not
inviting. The same crowded bars, the same roaring racket, the same
dust--yea, even the same thirst. He had seen it all before in other
parts of the world.

He was destined to wonder still more, and wearily, what he should do
with himself; for nearly a week went by before he could secure a seat in
the coach. A great depression came upon him, begotten of the heat and
the drowsiness and the dust, as day after day seemed to bring with it no
emancipation from the wind-swept, tin-built town, dumped down on its
surrounding flat and sad-looking desert waste. Yet nothing akin to
homesickness was there in his depression. He wanted to get onward, not
to return. He was bored and in the blues. Yet, as he looked back, the
feeling which predominated was that of freedom--of having a certain
measure of life and its prospects before him. Stay, though. His thoughts
would, at times, travel backward, and that in spite of himself, and they
would land him with a lingering, though unacknowledged, regretfulness,
on the deck of the _Persian_. Well, that was only an episode. It had
passed away out of his life, and it was as well that it had.

But--had it?

At last, to our wayfarer's unspeakable joy, deliverance came. It had
been Laurence's lot to travel in far worse conveyances than the regular
coaches which at that time performed the journey between Kimberley and
Johannesburg, a distance of close upon three hundred miles;
consequently, although not among the fortunate ones who had secured a
corner seat, he managed to make himself as comfortable as any traveller
in comparatively outlandish regions has a right to expect. His
fellow-passengers consisted, for the most part, of mechanics of the
better sort and a loquacious Jew--not at all a bad sort of fellow--in
conversation with whom he would now and then beguile the weariness of
the route. And it was weary. The flat sameness of the treeless plains,
as mile after mile brought no change; the same stony kopjes; the same
deserted and tumble-down mining structures; the same
God-forsaken-looking Dutch h