sets which are
sometimes seen in the South African summer time. The sky was full of
lowering clouds, and the sullen orb of the setting sun had stained them
perfectly blood-red. Blood-red they floated through the ominous sky, and
blood-red their shadows lay upon the grass. Even the air seemed red. It
looked as though earth and heaven had been steeped in blood; and, fresh
as John was from the sight of the dead driver, his ears yet tingling
with the tale of Bronker's Spruit, it is not to be wondered at that the
suggestive sight oppressed him, seated in that lonely waste, with no
company except the melancholy "_kakara-kakara_" of an old black _koran_
hidden away somewhere in the grass. He was not much given to such
reflections, but he did begin to wonder whether this was the last
journey of all the many he had made during the past twenty years, and if
for him a Boer bullet was about to solve the mystery of life and death.

Then he sank to the stage of depression that most people have made
acquaintance with at some time or another, when a man begins to ask,
"What is the use of it? Why were we born? What good do we do here? Why
should we--as the majority of mankind doubtless are--mere animals be
laden up with sorrows till at last our poor backs break? Is God powerful
or powerless? If powerful, why did He not let us sleep in peace, without
setting us here to taste of every pain and mortification, to become
acquainted with every grief, and then to perish miserably?" Old
questions these, which the sprightly critic justly condemns as morbid
and futile, and not to be dangled before a merry world of make-believe.
Perhaps he is right. It is better to play at marbles on a sepulchre than
to lift the lid and peep inside. But, for all that, they _will_ arise
when we sit alone at even in our individual wildernesses, surrounded,
perhaps, by mementoes of our broken hopes and tokens of our beloved
dead, strewn about us like the bleaching bones of the wild game on the
veldt, and in spirit watch the red sun of our existence sinking towards
its vapoury horizon. They _will_ come even to the sanguine, successful
man. One cannot always play at marbles; the lid of the sepulchre will
sometimes slip aside of itself, and we _must_ see. True, it depends
upon individual disposition. Some people can, metaphorically, smoke
cigarettes and make puns by the death-beds of their dearest friends, or
even on their own. We should pray for a disposition like that-