n. The man on the horse halted
also, and contemplated it in an absent kind of way.

"It's just like a man's life," he said aloud to his horse, "coming from
nobody knows where, nobody knows why, and making a little column of dust
on the world's highway, then passing away, leaving the dust to fall to
the ground again, to be trodden under foot and forgotten."

The speaker, a stout, well set-up, rather ugly man, apparently on the
wrong side of thirty, with pleasant blue eyes and a reddish peaked
beard, laughed a little at his own sententious reflection, and then gave
his jaded horse a tap with the _sjambock_ in his hand.

"Come on, Blesbok," he said, "or we shall never get to old Croft's place
to-night. By Jove! I believe that must be the turn," and he pointed with
his whip to a little rutty track that branched from the Wakkerstroom
main road and stretched away towards a curious isolated hill with a
large flat top, which rose out of the rolling plain some four miles to
the right. "The old Boer said the second turn," he went on still talking
to himself, "but perhaps he lied. I am told that some of them think it
is a good joke to send an Englishman a few miles wrong. Let's see, they
told me the place was under the lee of a table-topped hill, about half
an hour's ride from the main road, and that is a table-topped hill, so I
think I will try it. Come on, Blesbok," and he put the tired nag into
a sort of "tripple," or ambling canter much affected by South African
horses.

"Life is a queer thing," reflected Captain John Niel to himself as he
cantered along slowly. "Now here am I, at the age of thirty-four, about
to begin the world again as assistant to an old Transvaal farmer. It is
a pretty end to all one's ambitions, and to fourteen years' work in the
army; but it is what it has come to, my boy, so you had better make the
best of it."

Just then his cogitations were interrupted, for on the farther side of
a gentle slope suddenly there appeared an extraordinary sight. Over the
crest of the rise of land, now some four or five hundred yards away, a
pony with a lady on its back galloped wildly, and after it, with wings
spread and outstretched neck, a huge cock ostrich was speeding in
pursuit, covering twelve or fifteen feet at every stride of its long
legs. The pony was still twenty yards ahead of the bird, and travelling
towards John rapidly, but strive as it would it could not distance the
swiftest thing on all the earth. F