, and children, fast asleep.
Presently it burnt up brightly, and I saw that they too, five of them
altogether, were quite dead. One was a baby. I dropped the match in a
hurry, and was making my way from the hut as quick as I could go, when I
caught sight of two bright eyes staring out of a corner. Thinking it was
a wild cat, or some such animal, I redoubled my haste, when suddenly
a voice near the eyes began first to mutter, and then to send up a
succession of awful yells.

"Hastily I lit another match, and perceived that the eyes belonged to
an old woman, wrapped up in a greasy leather garment. Taking her by
the arm, I dragged her out, for she could not, or would not, come by
herself, and the stench was overpowering me. Such a sight as she was--a
bag of bones, covered over with black, shrivelled parchment. The only
white thing about her was her wool, and she seemed to be pretty well
dead except for her eyes and her voice. She thought that I was a devil
come to take her, and that is why she yelled so. Well, I got her down to
the waggon, and gave her a 'tot' of Cape smoke, and then, as soon as it
was ready, poured about a pint of beef-tea down her throat, made from
the flesh of a blue vilderbeeste I had killed the day before, and after
that she brightened up wonderfully. She could talk Zulu--indeed, it
turned out that she had run away from Zululand in T'Chaka's time--and
she told me that all the people whom I had seen had died of fever. When
they had died the other inhabitants of the kraal had taken the cattle
and gone away, leaving the poor old woman, who was helpless from age and
infirmity, to perish of starvation or disease, as the case might be. She
had been sitting there for three days among the bodies when I found her.
I took her on to the next kraal, and gave the headman a blanket to look
after her, promising him another if I found her well when I came back. I
remember that he was much astonished at my parting with two blankets for
the sake of such a worthless old creature. 'Why did I not leave her in
the bush?' he asked. Those people carry the doctrine of the survival of
the fittest to its extreme, you see.

"It was the night after I had got rid of the old woman that I made my
first acquaintance with my friend yonder," and he nodded towards the
skull that seemed to be grinning down at us in the shadow of the wide
mantel-shelf. "I had trekked from dawn till eleven o'clock--a long
trek--but I wanted to get on, and