ard to make that place the home it grew to.

"It's for you, boys," he said, "when I'm dead and gone;" and it was
about that time I began to think and understand more fully how father
was doing it all for the sake of us boys, and to try and ease his
heart-ache. Aunt Jenny set me thinking by her words, and at last I
fully grasped how it all was.

"I believe he'd have died broken-hearted, Val," she said to me, "if I
hadn't come to him. It was after your poor dear mother passed away. I
told him he was not acting like a man and a father to give up like that,
and it roused him; and one day--you remember, it was when I had come to
keep house for him--he turned to me and said, `I shall never be happy in
England again; and I've been thinking it would be a good thing to take
those boys out to the Cape and settle there. They'll grow up well and
strong in the new land, and I shall try to make a home for them yonder.'
`Yes, John,' I said, `that's the very thing you ought to do.' `Ah,' he
said, `but it means leaving you behind, Jenny, dear, and you'll perhaps
never set eyes upon them again.' `Oh, yes, I shall, John,' I said, `for
I've come to stay.' `What!' he cried; `would you go with us, sis?'
`Yes,' I said, `to the very end of the world.' So we came here, Val,
where there's plenty of room, and no neighbours to find fault with our
ways."

That's how it was; and now I can admire and think of how Aunt Jenny, the
prim maiden lady, gave up all her own old ways to set to and work and
drudge for us all, living in a wagon and then in a tent, and smiling
pleasantly at the trees we planted, and bringing us lunch where we were
working away, dragging down stones for the house which progressed so
slowly, though father's ideas wore modest.

"For," said he, "we'll build one big stone room, Val, and make it into
two with part of the tent. Then by-and-by we'll build another room
against it, and then another and another till we get it into a house."

Yes, it was hard work getting the stones, and we were busy enough one
day in the hot sunshine, about a month after the wagon had been with the
trees and stores, when Bob suddenly stood shading his eyes, and cried:

"Some one's coming!"

We looked up, and there, far in the distance, I saw a black figure
striding along under a great, broad matting-hat.

"Why, it looks like that great Kaffir, father," I said.

"Nonsense, boy," he replied; "the Kaffirs all look alike at a distance."

"B