rnet and his
family. Of his history previous to this I have stated all I know, but
for a period of many years after I am more minutely acquainted with it.
Most of its details I received from the lips of his own son. I was
greatly interested, and indeed instructed, by them. They were my first
lessons in African zoology.

Believing, boy reader, that they might also instruct and interest you, I
here lay them before you. You are not to regard them as merely fanciful.
The descriptions of the wild creatures that play their parts in this
little history, as well as the acts, habits, and instincts assigned to
them, you may regard as true to Nature. Young Von Bloom was a student of
Nature, and you may depend upon the fidelity of his descriptions.

Disgusted with politics, the field-cornet now dwelt on the remote
frontier--in fact, beyond the frontier, for the nearest settlement was
an hundred miles off. His "kraal" was in a district bordering the great
Kalihari desert--the Saaera of Southern Africa. The region around, for
hundreds of miles, was uninhabited, for the thinly-scattered, half-human
Bushmen who dwelt within its limits, hardly deserved the name of
inhabitants any more than the wild beasts that howled around them.

I have said that Von Bloom now followed the occupation of a "trek-boer."
Farming in the Cape colony consists principally in the rearing of
horses, cattle, sheep, and goats; and these animals form the wealth of
the boer. But the stock of our field-cornet was now a very small one.
The proscription had swept away all his wealth, and he had not been
fortunate in his first essays as a nomade grazier. The emancipation law,
passed by the British Government, extended not only to the Negroes of
the West India Islands, but also to the Hottentots of the Cape; and the
result of it was that the servants of Mynheer Von Bloom had deserted
him. His cattle, no longer properly cared for, had strayed off. Some of
them fell a prey to wild beasts--some died of the _murrain_. His horses,
too, were decimated by that mysterious disease of Southern Africa, the
"horse-sickness;" while his sheep and goats were continually being
attacked and diminished in numbers by the earth-wolf, the wild hound,
and the hyena. A series of losses had he suffered until his horses,
oxen, sheep, and goats, scarce counted altogether an hundred head. A
very small stock for a vee-boer, or South African grazier.

Withal our field-cornet was not unhappy. He