From the black ox's
nostrils foam and blood were streaming on to the ground. It turned its
head in its anguish and looked at me with its great starting eyes. It
was praying for help in its agony and weakness, and they took their
whips again. The creature bellowed aloud. If there is a God, it was
calling to its Maker for help. Then a stream of clear blood burst from
both nostrils; it fell on to the ground, and the wagon slipped back. The
man walked up to it.

"'You are going to lie down, devil, are you? We'll see you don't take it
too easy.'

"The thing was just dying. He opened his clasp-knife and stooped down
over it. I do not know what I did then. But afterward I know I had him
on the stones, and I was kneeling on him. The boys dragged me off. I
wish they had not. I left him standing in the sand in the road, shaking
himself, and I walked back to the town. I took nothing from that
accursed wagon, so I had only two shillings. But it did not matter. The
next day I got work at a wholesale store. My work was to pack and unpack
goods, and to carry boxes, and I had to work from six in the morning to
six in the evening; so I had plenty of time.

"I hired a little room, and subscribed to a library, so I had everything
I needed; and in the week of Christmas holidays I went to see the sea.
I walked all night, Lyndall, to escape the heat, and a little after
sunrise I got to the top of a high hill. Before me was a long, low,
blue, monotonous mountain. I walked looking at it, but I was thinking of
the sea I wanted to see. At last I wondered what that curious blue thing
might be; then it struck me it was the sea! I would have turned back
again, only I was too tired. I wonder if all the things we long to
see--the churches, the pictures, the men in Europe--will disappoint
us so! You see I had dreamed of it so long. When I was a little boy,
minding sheep behind the kopje, I used to see the waves stretching
out as far as the eye could reach in the sunlight. My sea! Is the idea
always more beautiful than the real?

"I got to the beach that afternoon, and I saw the water run up and down
on the sand, and I saw the white foam breakers; they were pretty, but I
thought I would go back the next day. It was not my sea.

"But I began to like it when I sat by it that night in the moonlight;
and the next day I liked it better; and before I left I loved it. It was
not like the sky and stars, that talk of what has no beginning and no
end; but