iled to behave as tallow
should, and the fisherman was reproached by his wife for interfering and
spoiling the soap. In a fit of disgust he threw the remainder of the
supposed tallow away.

He talked the matter over at the country store, and it was suggested
that his tallow was possibly the very valuable substance known as
ambergris. The man went home in haste, and managed to collect six
pounds, all that remained of the large quantity he brought home! The
local chemist identified it as ambergris, and showed the astonished
fisherman the price list, where it was quoted at thirty dollars an
ounce. His dismay can be imagined when he learned that, through his
ignorance, he had literally thrown away a fortune.

Ambergris is a secretion formed in the intestines of the sperm whale. It
is of a dull grey colour, and resembles tallow, excepting in the odour,
which is sweet and strong.

ROSS FRAME.

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

True Tales of the Year 1806.

VI.--JOHN COLTON'S DILEMMA.

[Illustration]

Cape Colony in 1806 was a very different country from the Cape Colony
about which, of late years, we have heard so much. It was then a quiet,
sleepy place under Dutch rule, having been given up to Holland by the
British, after the Peace of Amiens, in 1801. There were a few farms,
sparsely scattered over the country, and farmed in a most slovenly
manner by the Boers, or rather by their Hottentot slaves, for a true
Boer then thought work of any sort beneath him.

One of these farms, however, bore a great contrast to the rest; it was
about seventy miles from Capetown, and was known as the 'Garden Farm,'
from the rare fact of its possessing a well-stocked garden and a large
orchard of peach and apricot trees, all fenced in with a stout wooden
railing to keep off the pigs and cattle that were allowed to root and
rummage around the other homesteads at their own sweet will. The owner
of this farm was an Englishman, named John Colton: but he was a
naturalised burgher and married to a Dutch wife, so that every
one--perhaps even Colton himself--had long forgotten that he had not
been born and bred in his adopted country.

The year 1806 was, however, to change all this. Great Britain was at war
with France, and as the Cape was then the great highway to India, it was
felt that Capetown must be secured at all costs, for it was too
important a place to be allowed to fall into the hands of Buonaparte.

So a British force of some five