ss, that hurt. He had sat there for half an hour,
and he dared not go back to the close house.

He felt horribly lonely. There was not one thing so wicked as he in
all the world, and he knew it. He folded his arms and began to cry--not
aloud; he sobbed without making any sound, and his tears left scorched
marks where they fell. He could not pray; he had prayed night and day
for so many months; and tonight he could not pray. When he left off
crying, he held his aching head with his brown hands. If one might have
gone up to him and touched him kindly; poor, ugly little thing! Perhaps
his heart was almost broken.

With his swollen eyes he sat there on a flat stone at the very top of
the kopje; and the tree, with every one of its wicked leaves, blinked,
and blinked, and blinked at him. Presently he began to cry again, and
then stopped his crying to look at it. He was quiet for a long while,
then he knelt up slowly and bent forward. There was a secret he had
carried in his heart for a year. He had not dared to look at it; he had
not whispered it to himself, but for a year he had carried it. "I hate
God!" he said. The wind took the words and ran away with them, among the
stones, and through the leaves of the prickly pear. He thought it died
away half down the kopje. He had told it now!

"I love Jesus Christ, but I hate God."

The wind carried away that sound as it had done the first. Then he got
up and buttoned his old coat about him. He knew he was certainly lost
now; he did not care. If half the world were to be lost, why not he
too? He would not pray for mercy any more. Better so--better to know
certainly. It was ended now. Better so.

He began scrambling down the sides of the kopje to go home.

Better so! But oh, the loneliness, the agonized pain! for that night,
and for nights on nights to come! The anguish that sleeps all day on the
heart like a heavy worm, and wakes up at night to feed!

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, "Now deal us your
hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we
suffered when we were children."

The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense
loneliness, its intense agony.

Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.

At last came the year of the great drought, the year of
eighteen-sixty-two. From end to end of the land the earth cried for
water. Man and beast turned their eyes to the pitiless sky, that like
the roo