ng pheasants--why the deuce didn't I shoot one, light
a fire and broil him? Well, I did, then and there. Ever since then
I've always travelled with a shot-gun."

"I, for one, am very glad of it, to-day especially," laughed the priest.
"These birds are delicious."

They did ample justice to the bowl of _tywala_ too, then lit their
pipes, and lay chatting, at ease, the hollow roaring of the receding
storm--or was it another approaching?--enhancing the sense of comfort
within, under the influence of which conversation soon became
disjointed. Father Mathias started as his half-smoked pipe dropped from
his mouth, while his companion was already nodding. Both laughed.

"I think we had better say good-night," said the latter. "For my part,
I feel as if I could sleep till the crack of doom."

The kraal was wrapped in silence, save for an indistinct hum here and
there, where some of its occupants still carried on a lingering
conversation. At last even it died away, and as hour followed hour the
midnight silence was unbroken and profound.

Lamont was rather a light sleeper than otherwise, consequently it is not
surprising that, the burden of his last waking words notwithstanding, a
feeling of something half-scratching, half-tickling his ear, then his
cheek, should start him wide awake. Following a natural impulse, though
not perhaps a wise one, he brushed the thing off, and as he did so a
shudder of loathing and repulsion ran through him, for it had a sort of
feathery, leggy feel that made him guess its identity. Quickly he
struck a light. Sprawling over the floor of the hut was a huge
tarantula, looking more like an animal than an insect in the dim light
of the burning vesta. Then, alarmed, it moved across the floor at a
springy run, and before the spectator had decided how to put an end to
its loathly existence it disappeared within a crevice in the side of the
hut.

"Phew! what an awful-looking beast!" said Lamont to himself, with a
natural shudder at the thought of how the hairy monster had been
actually about to walk over his face in the darkness, and further, of
what a narrow escape he must have had from its venomous nippers as he
brushed it off. "They grow them large here, for that's the biggest I've
ever seen--by Jove it is!"

He struck another match. His companion was sleeping peacefully, but as
for himself all desire for sleep had fled. With his large experience of
sleeping in all sorts of places, i