ue. The more he licked the more he liked it, to
judge from his increased vigour and the loud purring noise he made. Then
I knew that the end had come, for in another second his file-like tongue
would have rasped through the skin of my leg--which was luckily pretty
tough--and have drawn the blood, and then there would be no chance
for me. So I just lay there and thought of my sins, and prayed to the
Almighty, and thought that, after all, life was a very enjoyable thing.

"And then all of a sudden I heard a crashing of bushes and the shouting
and whistling of men, and there were the two boys coming back with the
cattle, which they had found trekking along all together. The lions
lifted their heads and listened, then without a sound bounded off--and I
fainted.

"The lions came back no more that night, and by the next morning my
nerves had got pretty straight again; but I was full of wrath when I
thought of all that I had gone through at the hands, or rather noses,
of those four lions, and of the fate of my after-ox Kaptein. He was a
splendid ox, and I was very fond of him. So wroth was I that, like a
fool, I determined to attack the whole family of them. It was worthy of
a greenhorn out on his first hunting-trip; but I did it nevertheless.
Accordingly after breakfast, having rubbed some oil upon my leg, which
was very sore from the cub's tongue, I took the driver, Tom, who did not
half like the job, and having armed myself with an ordinary double No.
12 smooth-bore, the first breech-loader I ever had, I started. I took
the smooth-bore because it shot a bullet very well; and my experience
has been that a round ball from a smooth-bore is quite as effective
against a lion as an express bullet. The lion is soft, and not a
difficult animal to finish if you hit him anywhere in the body. A buck
takes far more killing.

"Well, I started, and the first thing I set to work to do was to try to
make out whereabouts the brutes lay up for the day. About three hundred
yards from the waggon was the crest of a rise covered with single
mimosa-trees, dotted about in a park-like fashion, and beyond this was
a stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan, or water-hole, which
covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed with reeds,
now in the sear and yellow leaf. From the farther edge of this pan the
ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had been cut
out by the action of the water, and was pretty thickly s