black people
are black; why the sunlight makes things warm. I shall read, read,
read," he muttered slowly. Then came over him suddenly what he called
"The presence of God"; a sense of a good, strong something folding him
round. He smiled through his half-shut eyes. "Ah, Father, my own Father,
it is so sweet to feel you, like the warm sunshine. The Bibles and books
cannot tell of you and all I feel you. They are mixed with men's words;
but you--"

His muttering sank into inaudible confusion, till, opening his eyes
wide, it struck him that the brown plain he looked at was the old home
farm. For half an hour they had been riding in it, and he had not known
it. He roused the leader, who sat nodding on the front of the wagon
in the early morning sunlight. They were within half a mile of the
homestead. It seemed to him that he had been gone from them all a year.
He fancied he could see Lyndall standing on the brick wall to watch for
him; his father, passing from one house to the other, stopping to look.

He called aloud to the oxen. For each one at home he had brought
something. For his father a piece of tobacco, bought at the shop by the
mill; for Em a thimble; for Lyndall a beautiful flower dug out by
the roots, at a place where they had outspanned; for Tant Sannie a
handkerchief. When they drew near the house he threw the whip to
the Kaffer leader, and sprung from the side of the wagon to run on.
Bonaparte stopped him as he ran past the ash-heap.

"Good morning, my dear boy. Where are you running to so fast with your
rosy cheeks?"

The boy looked up at him, glad even to see Bonaparte.

"I am going to the cabin," he said, out of breath.

"You won't find them in just now--not your good old father," said
Bonaparte.

"Where is he?" asked the lad.

"There, beyond the camps," said Bonaparte, waving his hand oratorically
toward the stone-walled ostrich-camps.

"What is he doing there?" asked the boy.

Bonaparte patted him on the cheek kindly.

"We could not keep him any more, it was too hot. We've buried him,
my boy," said Bonaparte, touching with his finger the boy's cheek. "We
couldn't keep him any more. He, he, he!" laughed Bonaparte, as the boy
fled away along the low stone wall, almost furtively, as one in fear.

*****

At five o'clock Bonaparte knelt before a box in the German's room. He
was busily unpacking it.

It had been agreed upon between Tant Sannie and himself, that now the
German was gone he, Bo