as lambs in the lambing season?"

She waddled off after Em in the direction of the built-in soap-pot,
leaving Gregory as they found him, with his dead pipe lying on the bench
beside him, and his blue eyes gazing out far across the flat, like one
who sits on the seashore watching that which is fading, fading from him.

Against his breast was a letter found in the desk addressed to himself,
but never posted. It held only four words: "You must marry Em." He wore
it in a black bag round his neck. It was the only letter she had ever
written to him.

"You see if the sheep don't have the scab this year!" said Tant Sannie
as she waddled after Em. "It's with all these new inventions that the
wrath of God must fall on us. What were the children of Israel punished
for, if it wasn't for making a golden calf? I may have my sins, but I
do remember the tenth commandment: 'Honour thy father and mother that it
may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long in the land which
the Lord thy God giveth thee!' It's all very well to say we honour them,
and then to be finding out things that they never knew, and doing things
in a way that they never did them! My mother boiled soap with bushes,
and I will boil soap with bushes. If the wrath of God is to fall upon
this land," said Tant Sannie, with the serenity of conscious virtue, "it
shall not be through me."

"Let them make their steam-wagons and their fire-carriages; let them go
on as though the dear Lord didn't know what he was about when He gave
horses and oxen legs--the destruction of the Lord will follow them. I
don't know how such people read their Bibles. When do we hear of Moses
or Noah riding in a railway? The Lord sent fire-carriages out of heaven
in those days: there's no chance of His sending them for us if we go
on in this way," said Tant Sannie sorrowfully, thinking of the splendid
chance which this generation had lost.

Arrived at the soap-pot she looked over into it thoughtfully.

"Depend upon it you'll get the itch, or some other disease; the blessing
of the Lord'll never rest upon it," said the Boer-woman. Then suddenly
she broke forth. "And she eighty-two, and goats, and rams, and eight
thousand morgen, and the rams real angora, and two thousand sheep, and a
short-horn bull," said Tant Sannie, standing upright and planting a hand
on each hip.

Em looked at her in silent wonder. Had connubial bliss and the joys of
motherhood really turned the old Boer-woman's he