e if
I have any.

First reason: Because Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good asked me.

Second reason: Because I am laid up here at Durban with the pain in my
left leg. Ever since that confounded lion got hold of me I have been
liable to this trouble, and being rather bad just now, it makes me limp
more than ever. There must be some poison in a lion's teeth, otherwise
how is it that when your wounds are healed they break out again,
generally, mark you, at the same time of year that you got your
mauling? It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions or more,
as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew
your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing,
and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't
like that. This is by the way.

Third reason: Because I want my boy Harry, who is over there at the
hospital in London studying to become a doctor, to have something to
amuse him and keep him out of mischief for a week or so. Hospital work
must sometimes pall and grow rather dull, for even of cutting up dead
bodies there may come satiety, and as this history will not be dull,
whatever else it may be, it will put a little life into things for a
day or two while Harry is reading of our adventures.

Fourth reason and last: Because I am going to tell the strangest story
that I remember. It may seem a queer thing to say, especially
considering that there is no woman in it--except Foulata. Stop, though!
there is Gagaoola, if she was a woman, and not a fiend. But she was a
hundred at least, and therefore not marriageable, so I don't count her.
At any rate, I can safely say that there is not a _petticoat_ in the
whole history.

Well, I had better come to the yoke. It is a stiff place, and I feel as
though I were bogged up to the axle. But, "_sutjes, sutjes_," as the
Boers say--I am sure I don't know how they spell it--softly does it. A
strong team will come through at last, that is, if they are not too
poor. You can never do anything with poor oxen. Now to make a start.

I, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman, make oath and
say--That's how I headed my deposition before the magistrate about poor
Khiva's and Ventvoegel's sad deaths; but somehow it doesn't seem quite
the right way to begin a book. And, besides, am I a gentleman? What is
a gentleman? I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with
niggers--no, I will scratch out that word "nigger