e experience of
mine. It was some three summers back, and I was out with a party of Boer
hunters. We had crossed the Northern boundary of the Transvaal, and were
camped on the ridges of the Sembombo. I had been out from sunrise, and
was returning about dusk with the skin of a fine black ostrich thrown
across the saddle in front of me, in the best of spirits at my good
luck. Making straight for the camp, I had hardly entered a thick bush
when I thought that I heard somebody behind me. Looking behind, I saw a
man mounted on a white horse. You can imagine my surprise, for my horse
was the only one in camp, and we were the only party in the country.
Without considering I quickened my pace into a canter, and on doing so
my follower appeared to do the same. At this I lost all confidence, and
made a run for it, with my follower in hot pursuit, as it appeared to my
imagination; and I did race for it (the skin went flying in about two
minutes, and my rifle would have done the same had it not been strapped
over my shoulders). This I kept up until I rode into camp right among
the pals cooking the evening meal. The Boers about the camp were quick
in their enquiries as to my distressed condition, and regaining
confidence, I was putting them off as best I could, when the old boss
(an old Boer of some sixty-eight or seventy years), looking up from the
fire, said:

"'The white horse! The Englishman has seen the white horse.'

"This I denied, but to no purpose. And that night round the camp fire I
took the trouble to make enquiries as to the antecedents of the white
horse. And the old Boer, after he had commanded silence, began. He said:

"'The English are not brave, but foolish. We beat them at Majuba, some
twenty-five seasons back. There was an Englishman here like you; he had
brought a horse with him, against our advice, to be killed with the fly,
the same as yours will be in a day or two. And he, like you, would go
where he was told not to go; and one day he went into a bush (that very
bush you rode through to-night), and he shot seven elephants, and the
next day he went in to fetch the ivory, and about night his horse came
into camp riderless, and was dead from the fly before the sun went down.
The Englishman is in that bush now; anyway, he never came back. And now
anybody who ventures into that bush is chased by the white horse. I
wouldn't go into that bush for all the ivory in the land. The English
are not brave, but foolish; w