t that Bingo's radiance dulls neighbouring surfaces by comparison?
"But don't let the thought of it spoil your good hour." The smile in the
eyes that have so many lines about them is kind, if the mouth under the
red-brown moustache is stern and sorrowful. "We don't have many of 'em.
Off with you and meet her!"

Captain Bingo tries to say something more, but makes a hash of it; and
with eyes that fairly run over, can only grip the kindly hand again and
again, assuring its owner, with numerous references to the Living Tinker,
that he is the most thundering brick on earth. Then, overthrowing the
small table and one of the chairs, he plunges down the narrow iron
stairway to get into what he calls his kit. Six minutes later, correct to
a buckle and a puttee-fold, he salutes his commanding officer, nodding
pleasantly to him from Nixey's roof, and buckets down the street at a
tremendous gallop, the happiest man in Gueldersdorp, with this shout
following him:

"My regards to Lady Hannah. And tell her that the Staff dine on gee-gee at
six o'clock sharp, and I shall be charmed if she'll join us."

XXXVIII

The little Olopo River, a mere branch of the bigger river that makes
fertile British Baraland, runs from east to west, along the southern side
of Gueldersdorp, swelled by innumerable thready water-courses, dry in the
blistering winter heat, that the wet season disperses among the foothills
that bristle with Brounckers' artillery. Seen from the altitude of a
balloon or a war-kite, the course of the beer-coloured stream, flowing
lazily between its high banks sparsely wooded with oak and blue gum, and
lavishly clothed with cactus, mimosa, and tree-fern, tall grasses, and
thorny creepers, would have looked like a verdant ribbon meandering over
the dun-and-ochre-coloured veld, where patches of bluish-green are
beginning to spread. The south bank, where the bush grows thinnest, was
frequently patronised by picnic-parties, and at all times a place of
resort for strolling sweethearts. The north bank, much more precipitous,
was clothed with a tangled luxuriance of vegetation, and threaded only by
native paths, so narrow as to prove discouraging to pedestrians desirous
of walking side by side. Where the outermost line of defences impinged
upon the river-bed, the trees had been cut down and the bush levelled. But
east of Maxim Outpost South, and the rifle-pits that flanked Fort
Ellerslie, all was as it had been for hundreds of