ead of that horrid hole, for which, after all, Eldorado
was hardly a misnomer, a very different scene stretched away before us
clad in the silver robe of the moonlight. We were camped--Harry and
I, two Kaffirs, a Scotch cart, and six oxen--on the swelling side of a
great wave of bushclad land. Just where we had made our camp, however,
the bush was very sparse, and only grew about in clumps, while here
and there were single flat-topped mimosa-trees. To our right a little
stream, which had cut a deep channel for itself in the bosom of the
slope, flowed musically on between banks green with maidenhair, wild
asparagus, and many beautiful grasses. The bed-rock here was red
granite, and in the course of centuries of patient washing the water had
hollowed out some of the huge slabs in its path into great troughs and
cups, and these we used for bathing-places. No Roman lady, with her
baths of porphyry or alabaster, could have had a more delicious spot to
bathe herself than we found within fifty yards of our skerm, or rough
inclosure of mimosa thorn, that we had dragged together round the cart
to protect us from the attacks of lions. That there were several of
these brutes about, I knew from their spoor, though we had neither heard
nor seen them.

"Our bath was a little nook where the eddy of the stream had washed away
a mass of soil, and on the edge of it there grew a most beautiful old
mimosa thorn. Beneath the thorn was a large smooth slab of granite
fringed all round with maidenhair and other ferns, that sloped gently
down to a pool of the clearest sparkling water, which lay in a bowl of
granite about ten feet wide by five feet deep in the centre. Here to
this slab we went every morning to bathe, and that delightful bath is
among the most pleasant of my hunting reminiscences, as it is also, for
reasons which will presently appear, among the most painful.

"It was a lovely night. Harry and I sat to the windward of the fire,
where the two Kaffirs were busily employed in cooking some impala steaks
off a buck which Harry, to his great joy, had shot that morning, and
were as perfectly contented with ourselves and the world at large as two
people could possibly be. The night was beautiful, and it would require
somebody with more words on the tip of his tongue than I have to
describe properly the chastened majesty of those moonlit wilds. Away for
ever and for ever, away to the mysterious north, rolled the great bush
ocean over whi