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sword in my hands, I began to wonder whether I was in a dream. Was it possible that the beautiful brunette before me, chieftain of a tribe of outlandish Kaffirs, came of such stock as this? The idea seemed too wildly improbable. Yet, if her tale and the evidence before me meant anything, it meant that this sword, these gold coins, had once belonged to Maurice of the Rhine. I took the book in my hand and turned over its yellow pages. What I saw there yet more electrified me, and stimulated yet further my imagination. The book was an old French work on hawking, entitled, _La Fauconnerie; par Charles d'Esperon; Paris_: 1605. On the fly-leaf was written, in an antique yet clear hand:--" "Mauritio P. D.D. Mater Amantissima, Elizabetha R. 1635." Translated, this would run: "To Maurice, Prince, a gift from his most loving mother, Elizabeth, Queen, 1635." "There was no earthly reason to suppose that the inscription upon that old fly-leaf lied. That book then had once belonged to Prince Maurice; had once been the loving gift to him of the unlucky, beautiful Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, his mother. It seemed so strange, so tragic, to find here these relics of the old Stuart blood; to see before me perhaps even a descendant of that ill-starred line; that my mind, as I gazed from the old book to Mapana, from Mapana's soft eyes to the book again, ran in a flood of strangely mingled emotions. I asked Mapana again to tell me how these things had come into her family. "She reiterated that her father and grandfather had always told her that these were the things of Morinza (was not this name, I asked myself, an African corruption of Moritz or Maurice?), the white man, their ancestor. That he had them with him when he encountered the tribe. That in those days the Umfanzi lived much farther to the west (she indicated the direction with her hand), not far from a great water (probably the South Atlantic); that other things of his had also formerly belonged to them, but had almost all been lost in wars and wanderings. "Now I have been always fond of history, and, as a youngster, the story of the Stuarts had a deep interest for me. I had a clear recollection in my mind that Prince Maurice had been lost at sea some time during the Commonwealth or Cromwell's Protectorate, while on a privateering or filibustering expedition. Was it not possible, I asked myself, that he had been wrecked off the African coast, or even maroon
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