. After all, it was the baboon
that suffered most, if his yells were any index to his feelings.
Frikkie could smudge a fly ten feet off with just a flick of his whip,
and all the tender parts of the accomplished animal came in for
ruthless attention.

"He ought to be shot," was Frikkie's remark as he coiled up the thong,
at the end of the discipline. "A baboon is past teaching if he has bad
habits. He is more like a man than a beast."

The Vrouw Grobelaar seated herself in the stoop-chair which by common
consent was reserved for her use, and shook her head.

"Baboons are uncanny things," she answered slowly. "When you shoot
them, you can never be quite sure how much murder there is in it. The
old story is that some of them have souls and some not; and it is
quite certain that they can talk when they will. You have heard them
crying in the night sometimes. Well, you ask a Kafir what that means.
Ask an old wise Kafir, not a young one that has forgotten the wisdom
of the black people and learned only the foolishness of the white."

"What does it mean, Tante?" It was I who put the question. Katje, too,
seemed curious.

The old lady eyed me gloomily.

"If you were a landed Boer instead of a kind of schoolmaster," she
replied witheringly, "you would not need to ask such a question. But I
will tell you. A baboon may be wicked,--look at that one showing his
teeth and cursing!--but he is not blind nor a fool. He runs about on
the hills, and steals and fights and scratches, and all the time he
has all the knowledge and twice the strength of a man, if it were not
for the tail behind him and the hair on his body. So it is natural
that sometimes he should be grieved to be such a mean thing as a
baboon, when he could be a useful kind of man if the men would let
him. And at nights, particularly, when their troop is in laager and
the young ones are on watch among the high rocks, it comes home to the
best of them, and they sob and weep like young widows, pretending that
they have pains inside, so that the others shall not feel offended and
turn on them. Any one may hear them in the kloofs on a windless night,
and, I can tell you, the sound of their sorrow is pitiful."

Katje threw out a suggestion to console them with buckshot, and the
Vrouw Grobelaar nodded meaningly.

"To hate baboons is well enough in the wife of a burgher," she said
sweetly. "I am glad to see there is so much fitness and wifeliness
about you, since you wil