, but the
partitioned bedsteads charmed Phoebe. She said, "Oh, doctor, how can one
man's head hold so many things? If there's a man on earth I can trust my
husband with, 'tis you. But if things go cross up there, promise me you
will come back at once and cast in your lot with us. We have got money
and stock, and you have got headpiece; we might do very well together.
Indeed, indeed we might. Promise me. Oh, do, please, promise me!"

"I promise you."

And on this understanding, Staines and Falcon were equipped with rifles,
pickaxe, shovels, waterproofs, and full saddle-bags, and started, with
many shakings of the hand, and many tears from Phoebe, for the diamond
washings.

CHAPTER XXI.

Phoebe's tears at parting made Staines feel uncomfortable, and he said
so.

"Pooh, pooh!" said Falcon, "crying for nothing does a woman good."

Christopher stared at him.

Falcon's spirits rose as they proceeded. He was like a boy let loose
from school. His fluency and charm of manner served, however, to cheer a
singularly dreary journey.

The travellers soon entered on a vast and forbidding region, that
wearied the eye; at their feet a dull, rusty carpet of dried grass and
wild camomile, with pale-red sand peeping through the burnt and scanty
herbage. On the low mounds, that looked like heaps of sifted ashes,
struggled now and then into sickliness a ragged, twisted shrub. There
were flowers too, but so sparse, that they sparkled vainly in the
colorless waste, which stretched to the horizon. The farmhouses were
twenty miles apart, and nine out of ten of them were new ones built by
the Boers since they degenerated into white savages: mere huts, with
domed kitchens behind them. In the dwelling-house the whole family
pigged together, with raw flesh drying on the rafters, stinking skins
in a corner, parasitical vermin of all sorts blackening the floor, and
particularly a small, biting, and odoriferous tortoise, compared with
which the insect a London washerwoman brings into your house in her
basket, is a stroke with a feather--and all this without the excuse of
penury; for many of these were shepherd kings, sheared four thousand
fleeces a year, and owned a hundred horses and horned cattle.

These Boers are compelled, by unwritten law, to receive travellers and
water their cattle; but our travellers, after one or two experiences,
ceased to trouble them; for, added to the dirt, the men were sullen, the
women moody, silent, b