nd to
withhold the qualifying adjective. The absorption of it--ancient and
modern--was his craze and his delight. He never had found time to
indulge this during a hard-worked and hardening life, but had always
looked forward to a good time coming when he should be able to do so.
Now it had come.

It may be wondered why he did not settle down in some town, where there
was a good library, and acquaintances from whom he could borrow useful
books; and indeed several did venture so to hint. But his answer was
simple. He had lived in the veldt all his life--up country or down, or
on the road. He would feel lost if he did not wake up to hear the
multifold sounds of the bush--to inhale the fresh, strong, sweet air as
the sun shot up fiery over tree-fringed ridge or iron mountain top. And
the life of the veldt! It had always been his life--it was too late to
change now. To look round on the black wildness of those bushy kloofs,
or yonder great mountain, frowning down majestically, with its mighty
cliff wall shining red in the afterglow of the sunset, and to realise
that he owned all this--that this fragment of splendid Nature was his
property--all his own--why the realisation was sheer ecstasy. Whereby
it is obvious that there was a large element of the poetic about the
man.

Exchange all this for a sun-baked, dust-swept town? Not he. It had
even been hinted to him by well meaning acquaintances--mostly of the
feminine persuasion--that there was his daughter to be considered, that
life alone in a wild and sparsely colonised part of the country was
rather a dull life for a girl. This was certainly touching him on a
susceptible point, but to such representations he would reply that even
up-to-date fathers were entitled to some consideration--that even they
could not be required to take a back seat in every question. For the
rest there was nothing he denied his daughter which by any possibility
he could procure for her; moreover she could have as many friends to
stay with her as the house would hold, and for as long as she chose.
But somehow she seldom had any. For some reason or other they rarely
came. This, however, did not trouble Edala in the least. She was not
particularly fond of other girls. She was too individual for most girls
of her age. They could not quite make her out. And--there may have
been another reason.

But on this score Edala herself never complained. Her occupations and
amusements filled