bstemious man, having conceived,
as he used to say, a great horror of drink from observing its effects
upon the class of men--hunters, transport riders, and others--amongst
whom he had passed so many years of his life. Consequently the good wine
took more effect on him that it would have done on most men, sending a
little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and making him talk more freely
than usual.

Dear old man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the
vestibule, with his grey hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion,
his shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keen
as any hawk's, and yet soft as a buck's. The whole room was hung with
trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story
about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell them. Generally
he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures,
but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.

"Ah, you brute!" he said, stopping beneath an unusually large skull of
a lion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row of
guns, its jaws distended to their utmost width. "Ah, you brute! you have
given me a lot of trouble for the last dozen years, and will, I suppose,
to my dying day."

"Tell us the yarn, Quatermain," said Good. "You have often promised to
tell me, and you never have."

"You had better not ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."

"All right," I said, "the evening is young, and there is some more
port."

Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco
that was always standing on the mantelpiece, and still walking up and
down the room, began--

"It was, I think, in the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni's
country. It was just after old Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got into
power--I forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the Bapedi
people had brought down an enormous quantity of ivory from the interior,
and so I started with a waggon-load of goods, and came straight away
from Middelburg to try and trade some of it. It was a risky thing to
go into the country so early, on account of the fever; but I knew that
there were one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determined
to have a try for it, and take my chance of fever. I had become so tough
from continual knocking about that I did not set it down at much.

"Well, I got on all right for a while. It is a wonderfully beautiful
piece of