ach other.

Before I returned to the country of my birth, she too had been gathered
to the land of shadows, leaving three children behind her. Ah me! all
this took place so long ago, when I was young who now am old.

Perhaps it may interest the reader to know the fate of Mr. Carson's
property, which should of course have gone to his grandson Harry. I
wrote to England to claim the estate on his behalf, but the lawyer
to whom the matter was submitted said that my marriage to Stella, not
having been celebrated by an ordained priest, was not legal according to
English law, and therefore Harry could not inherit. Foolishly enough
I acquiesced in this, and the property passed to a cousin of my
father-in-law's; but since I have come to live in England I have been
informed that this opinion is open to great suspicion, and that there
is every probability that the courts would have declared the marriage
perfectly binding as having been solemnly entered into in accordance
with the custom of the place where it was contracted. But I am now so
rich that it is not worth while to move in the matter. The cousin is
dead, his son is in possession, so let him keep it.

Once, and once only, did I revisit Babyan Kraals. Some fifteen years
after my darling's death, when I was a man in middle life, I undertook
an expedition to the Zambesi, and one night outspanned at the mouth of
the well-known valley beneath the shadow of the great peak. I mounted
my horse, and, quite alone, rode up the valley, noticing with a strange
prescience of evil that the road was overgrown, and, save for the music
of the waterfalls, the place silent as death. The kraals that used to be
to the left of the road by the river had vanished. I rode towards their
site; the mealie fields were choked with weeds, the paths were dumb with
grass. Presently I reached the place. There, overgrown with grass, were
the burnt ashes of the kraals, and there among the ashes, gleaming in
the moonlight, lay the white bones of men. Now it was clear to me. The
settlement had been fallen on by some powerful foe, and its inhabitants
put to the assegai. The forebodings of the natives had come true; Babyan
Kraals were peopled by memories alone.

I passed on up the terraces. There shone the roofs of the marble huts.
They would not burn, and were too strong to be easily pulled down. I
entered one of them--it had been our sleeping hut--and lit a candle
which I had with me. The huts had been sacke