nts had sprung up among
its stones, and on the very summit a clump of prickly-pears lifted their
thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moonlight on their
broad fleshy leaves. At the foot of the kopje lay the homestead.
First, the stone-walled sheep kraals and Kaffer huts; beyond them the
dwelling-house--a square, red-brick building with thatched roof. Even on
its bare red walls, and the wooden ladder that led up to the loft, the
moonlight cast a kind of dreamy beauty, and quite etherealized the low
brick wall that ran before the house, and which inclosed a bare patch of
sand and two straggling sunflowers. On the zinc roof of the great open
wagon-house, on the roofs of the outbuildings that jutted from its side,
the moonlight glinted with a quite peculiar brightness, till it seemed
that every rib in the metal was of burnished silver.

Sleep ruled everywhere, and the homestead was not less quiet than the
solitary plain.

In the farmhouse, on her great wooden bedstead, Tant Sannie, the
Boer-woman, rolled heavily in her sleep.

She had gone to bed, as she always did, in her clothes, and the night
was warm and the room close, and she dreamed bad dreams. Not of the
ghosts and devils that so haunted her waking thoughts; not of her second
husband the consumptive Englishman, whose grave lay away beyond the
ostrich-camps, nor of her first, the young Boer; but only of the sheep's
trotters she had eaten for supper that night. She dreamed that one stuck
fast in her throat, and she rolled her huge form from side to side, and
snorted horribly.

In the next room, where the maid had forgotten to close the shutter, the
white moonlight fell in in a flood, and made it light as day. There were
two small beds against the wall. In one lay a yellow-haired child, with
a low forehead and a face of freckles; but the loving moonlight hid
defects here as elsewhere, and showed only the innocent face of a child
in its first sweet sleep.

The figure in the companion bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for
it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover
on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs.
Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the moonlight that was
bathing her.

"Em!" she called to the sleeper in the other bed; but received no
answer. Then she drew the cover from the floor, turned her pillow, and
pulling the sheet over her head, went to sleep again.

Only in one of the ou