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