sal
of the accounts of the new land to which they were to go.

On the following Saturday, to the surprise of all Castleton, an
advertisement appeared in the Derbyshire paper announcing the sale by
auction at an early date of Mr Humphreys' farm.

Dick and John were quite heroes among their companions, who looked with
envy at boys who were going to live in a land where lions and elephants
and all sorts of wild beasts abounded, to say nothing of warlike
natives.

"There always seem to be Kaffir wars going on," one boy said, "out at
the Cape; you will have all sorts of excitement, Dick."

"I don't think that sort of excitement will be nice," Dick replied; "it
must be horribly anxious work to think every time you go out to work
that the place may be attacked and every one killed before you get back.
But that is all nonsense, you know; I have been reading about some of
the Kaffir wars; they are in the bush-country, down by the sea. We are
going up on to the high lands at the back of Natal. Father says very
likely we may buy a farm in the Transvaal, but mother does not seem to
like the accounts of the Dutchmen or Boers, as they are called, who live
there, and says she would rather have English neighbours; so I expect if
we can get a farm somewhere in the Natal colony, we shall do so."

"You seem to know all about the place," the boy said, surprised.

"Well, we have had seven or eight books to read about it, and I seem now
to know more about South Africa than about any other country in the
world. There are the diamond-fields, too, out there, and I hope, before
I settle down regularly to a farm, that father will let me go for a few
months and try my luck there. Would it not just be jolly to find a
diamond as big as a pigeon's egg and worth about twenty thousand
pounds?"

"And do they do that?" the boy asked.

"Well, they don't often find them as big as that; still, one might be
the lucky one."

The news that Mr Humphreys and his family were about to sell off and
emigrate naturally caused a great deal of talk in and around Castleton,
and put the idea into the minds of many who had never before seriously
thought of it. If Mr Humphreys, who had one of the best farms in the
neighbourhood, thought that it would pay him to sell his land and go
out, it would surely be a good thing for others to do the same. He was
considered to be a good farmer and a long-headed man; one who would not
take such a step without carefully