e necessarily light sleepers.
When no particular reason for watchfulness exists, your South African
native is anything but that. Rolled up in his blanket, head and all, he
will sleep as soundly as the dead, and will require little short of
violence to awaken him; wherefore the other inhabitants of the hut,
being utterly unsuspicious of the presence of a stranger in their midst,
had attained to exactly that stage of somnolence; consequently, when the
said stranger crept through the door, no one was aware of it. Again his
nerves thrilled as he found himself once more in the chilly night air.
He had still a little way to go. What if the dogs should wind him as he
crossed the open space, and raise a clamour? But they did not, and with
a sigh of infinite relief he found himself safe within his own hut. He
could hear his travelling companion mildly snoring. What an
extraordinary piece of luck that they should have met when they did,
for, by the light of what he had heard, he had no doubt but that his
treacherous entertainers would have murdered him. Had he spent the
night alone in that kraal, such would have been his fate, but the
superstitious dread in which, for some reason or other, they seemed to
hold the priest, had saved him, and in the result would save a good many
more.

Then the grisly agency of his awakening occurred to him, and indeed no
more effective means could have been employed not merely to do so but to
keep him awake. His fellow traveller would, he supposed, have called it
the hand of Providence, and he thought it looked very much as if such
were the case, for Lamont was no scoffer.

"I suppose I ought to make a vow never again to kill a tarantula," he
said to himself; "for what would have been the result had I slept as
hard and long as our good friend over there, well, Heaven only knows."

Sitting there in the darkness, waiting for dawn, he was thinking, and
thinking hard. There had been warning rumours here and there that the
natives were not so content under the white man's rule as was supposed--
nor that they deemed themselves anything like so roundly squashed and
beaten less than three years earlier as they should have. Such rumours,
however, were not acceptable to the "powers that were," and their
originators discouraged; and bearing this in mind, what was seemingly
the most obvious course--to lose no time in warning the proper
authorities, to wit--was the very last thing that Lamont had de