nd therewith a pain. How is it begun? It is begun since
middageten yesterday. And little Dierck here has the belly-ache, and is
giddy in the head."

"Little Dierck will have something worse than the belly-ache, and you
also, if you eat of broth or vegetables cooked in a vessel as unclean as
that, mevrouw."

"Hoe?" The large flabby face under the expansive kappje became red as the
South African sunset. She flourished the venerable copper stewpan, its rim
liberally garnished with verdigris, ancient deposit of fatty matters
accumulated at the bottom. "Do you call my good stewpan, that my mother
cooked beef and succotash and pottage-herbs in before me, an unclean
vessel--you? And were the pan otherwise than clean as my hand--as my
apron!"--a double comparison of the unfortuitous kind--"how should I alter
matters in a heathen place like this?" Her large bosom rocked
tumultuously. "Dwelling at the bottom of a mud-hole like a frog, O God of
my fathers! with bullets as big as pumpkins trundling overhead, ready to
whip your head off your body if you as much as stick your nose above
ground--the accursed things!"

"They are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen, Tante, so you ought to
speak of them more civilly. And--scour the pot with a double-handful of
clean sand; it will be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here,
jongen--give me a look at the little tongue." The boy went to him
confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with innocent wide eyes in the
square, powerful face, as Saxham swung round his wallet, continuing,
"Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a
cup of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting----"

"Alamachtig!" she protested. "Is that the Engelsch way of doctoring? To
put another belly-grief on the top of the one you have got, what sense is
in that?"

"It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old one. Give the
boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water, and remember to scour the pans."

Saxham passed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-booted, spurred feet
between the dung and chip fires curling up in blue smoke-spirals, and the
sprawling children, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catching
up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the eruption was
innocent ere he passed on, visiting every waggon-dwelling and cave-refuge,
rating the inhabitants of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging
from three or four of the stuffy, ill-sme