olleagues Osborn, Fynney, Clarke and others, every
one of them long since "gone down."

Perhaps it may be as well that this is so, at any rate in the case of
one who desires to write of the Zulus as a reigning nation, which now
they have ceased to be, and to try to show them as they were, in all
their superstitious madness and bloodstained grandeur.

Yet then they had virtues as well as vices. To serve their Country in
arms, to die for it and for the King; such was their primitive ideal. If
they were fierce they were loyal, and feared neither wounds nor doom; if
they listened to the dark redes of the witch-doctor, the trumpet-call
of duty sounded still louder in their ears; if, chanting their terrible
"Ingoma," at the King's bidding they went forth to slay unsparingly, at
least they were not mean or vulgar. From those who continually must face
the last great issues of life or death meanness and vulgarity are
far removed. These qualities belong to the safe and crowded haunts of
civilised men, not to the kraals of Bantu savages, where, at any rate of
old, they might be sought in vain.

Now everything is changed, or so I hear, and doubtless in the balance
this is best. Still we may wonder what are the thoughts that pass
through the mind of some ancient warrior of Chaka's or Dingaan's time,
as he suns himself crouched on the ground, for example, where once stood
the royal kraal, Duguza, and watches men and women of the Zulu blood
passing homeward from the cities or the mines, bemused, some of them,
with the white man's smuggled liquor, grotesque with the white man's
cast-off garments, hiding, perhaps, in their blankets examples of the
white man's doubtful photographs--and then shuts his sunken eyes and
remembers the plumed and kilted regiments making that same ground shake
as, with a thunder of salute, line upon line, company upon company, they
rushed out to battle.

Well, because the latter does not attract me, it is of this former time
that I have tried to write--the time of the Impis and the witch-finders
and the rival princes of the royal House--as I am glad to learn from
you, not quite in vain. Therefore, since you, so great an expert,
approve of my labours in the seldom-travelled field of Zulu story, I ask
you to allow me to set your name upon this page and subscribe myself,

Gratefully and sincerely yours,

H. RIDER HAGGARD.

Ditchingham, 12th October, 1912.

To James Stuart, Esq., Late Assistant Secre