}.

'There,' said Mr Mackenzie, 'did you ever see a sword like that?'

We all examined it and shook our heads.

'Well, I have got it to show you, because this is what the man
who said he had seen the white people brought with him, and because
it does more or less give an air of truth to what I should otherwise
have set down as a lie. Look here; I will tell you all that
I know about the matter, which is not much. One afternoon, just
before sunset, I was sitting on the veranda, when a poor, miserable,
starved-looking man came limping up and squatted down before
me. I asked him where he came from and what he wanted, and thereon
he plunged into a long rambling narrative about how he belonged
to a tribe far in the north, and how his tribe was destroyed
by another tribe, and he with a few other survivors driven still
further north past a lake named Laga. Thence, it appears, he
made his way to another lake that lay up in the mountains, "a
lake without a bottom" he called it, and here his wife and brother
died of an infectious sickness -- probably smallpox -- whereon
the people drove him out of their villages into the wilderness,
where he wandered miserably over mountains for ten days, after
which he got into dense thorn forest, and was one day found there
by some _white men_ who were hunting, and who took him to a place
where all the people were white and lived in stone houses. Here
he remained a week shut up in a house, till one night a man with
a white beard, whom he understood to be a "medicine-man", came
and inspected him, after which he was led off and taken through
the thorn forest to the confines of the wilderness, and given
food and this sword (at least so he said), and turned loose.'

'Well,' said Sir Henry, who had been listening with breathless
interest, 'and what did he do then?'

'Oh! he seems, according to his account, to have gone through
sufferings and hardships innumerable, and to have lived for weeks
on roots and berries, and such things as he could catch and kill.
But somehow he did live, and at last by slow degrees made his
way south and reached this place. What the details of his journey
were I never learnt, for I told him to return on the morrow,
bidding one of my headmen look after him for the night. The
headman took him away, but the poor man had the itch so badly
that the headman's wife would not have him in the hut for fear
of catching it, so he was given a blanket and told to sleep outs