hat wailed about the hut when she was born.[*]

[*--The Zulu word "Meena"--or more correctly "Mina"--means
"Come here," and would therefore be a name not unsuitable to
one of the heroine's proclivities; but Mr. Quatermain does
not seem to accept this interpretation.--EDITOR.]

Since I have been settled in England I have read--of course in a
translation--the story of Helen of Troy, as told by the Greek poet,
Homer. Well, Mameena reminds me very much of Helen, or, rather, Helen
reminds me of Mameena. At any rate, there was this in common between
them, although one of them was black, or, rather, copper-coloured,
and the other white--they both were lovely; moreover, they both were
faithless, and brought men by hundreds to their deaths. There, perhaps,
the resemblance ends, since Mameena had much more fire and grit than
Helen could boast, who, unless Homer misrepresents her, must have been
but a poor thing after all. Beauty Itself, which those old rascals of
Greek gods made use of to bait their snares set for the lives and honour
of men, such was Helen, no more; that is, as I understand her, who have
not had the advantage of a classical education. Now, Mameena, although
she was superstitious--a common weakness of great minds--acknowledging
no gods in particular, as we understand them, set her own snares, with
varying success but a very definite object, namely, that of becoming the
first woman in the world as she knew it--the stormy, bloodstained world
of the Zulus.

But the reader shall judge for himself, if ever such a person should
chance to cast his eye upon this history.

It was in the year 1854 that I first met Mameena, and my acquaintance
with her continued off and on until 1856, when it came to an end in a
fashion that shall be told after the fearful battle of the Tugela in
which Umbelazi, Panda's son and Cetewayo's brother--who, to his sorrow,
had also met Mameena--lost his life. I was still a youngish man in
those days, although I had already buried my second wife, as I have told
elsewhere, after our brief but happy time of marriage.

Leaving my boy in charge of some kind people in Durban, I started into
"the Zulu"--a land with which I had already become well acquainted as a
youth, there to carry on my wild life of trading and hunting.

For the trading I never cared much, as may be guessed from the little
that ever I made out of it, the art of traffic being in truth repugnant
to me. But h