ilt round with a wall of spells?--and more of such talk,
which Thomas thought so horrible and blasphemous that he fled before its
torrent.

But when he came back calmer he said no more to Tabitha about her
escapade.

It was a long while afterwards, at the beginning of the great drought,
that another terrible thing happened. On a certain calm and beautiful
day Tabitha, who still grew and flourished, had taken some of the
Christian children to a spot on the farther side of the koppie, where
stood an old fortification originally built for purposes of defence.
Here, among the ancient walls, with the assistance of the natives, she
had made a kind of summer-house as children love to do, and in this
house, like some learned eastern pundit in a cell, a very pretty pundit
crowned with a wreath of flowers, she sat upon the ground and instructed
the infant mind of Sisa-Land.

She was supposed to be telling them Bible stories to prepare them
for their Sunday School examination, which, indeed, she did with
embellishments and in their own poetic and metaphorical fashion. The
particular tale upon which she was engaged, by a strange coincidence,
was that from the Acts which narrates how St. Paul was bitten by a viper
upon the Island of Melita, and how he shook it off into the fire and
took no hurt.

"He must have been like Menzi," said Ivana, who was present, whereon
Tabitha's other attendant, who was also with her as it was daytime,
started an argument, for being a Christian she was no friend to Menzi,
whom she called a "dirty old witch-doctor."

Tabitha, who was used to these disputations, listened smiling, and while
she listened amused herself by trying to thrust a stone into a hole in
the side of her summer-house, which was formed by one of the original
walls of the old kraal.

Presently she uttered a scream, and snatched her arm out of the hole. To
it, or rather to her hand, was hanging a great hooded snake of the cobra
variety such as the Boers call _ringhals_. She shook it off, and the
reptile, after sitting up, spitting, hissing and expanding its hood,
glided back into the wall. Tabitha sat still, staring at her lacerated
finger, which Ivana seized and sucked.

Then, bidding one of the oldest of the children to take her place
and continue sucking, Ivana ran to a high rock a few yards away which
overlooked Menzi's kraal, that lay upon a plain at a distance of about a
quarter of a mile, and called out in the low, rin