nd gorges of the blue hills on the horizon were at
that time the natural homes of leopards or "Cape-tigers" and huge
baboons.

These animals are, however, extremely wary. The baboons go about in
troops, and are wont to leave a trusty old-man baboon on guard, while
the rest go down at early morn to rob the settler of his fruits and
vegetables. If the old man happens to see or scent danger he gives a
signal and the troop flies helter-skelter to the nearest cliffs. They
are therefore not easily got at by hunters. As to "tigers," they go
about stealthily like cats. I was told there was not a chance of
getting a shot at them, unless I went out with dogs and a hunting party
for the purpose. As this could not be accomplished at the time, I had
to content myself with smaller game.

Bonny, (one of Hobson's younger sons), and I went out one day after
breakfast to try for a steenbok before dinner. There were plenty of
them in the stretches of bush-land that dotted the Karroo in the
immediate neighbourhood of the farmhouse.

Stretching out at a gallop with that light-hearted cheerfulness which is
engendered by bright weather, fresh air, and a good mount, we skirted
the river where Hreikie nursed her little flock.

Hreikie was a small Hottentot girl, as lightly clad as was compatible
with propriety. Her face was dirty brown, her mouth large, her nose a
shapeless elevation with two holes in the front of it. Her head was not
covered, but merely sprinkled with tight woolly knobs or curls the size
of peas. Each knob grew apart from its neighbour knob, and was
surrounded, so to speak, by bald or desert land. This style of hair was
not peculiar to Hreikie alone, but to the whole Hottentot race.
Hreikie's family consisted of thirty-three young ostriches, which,
though only a few weeks of age, stood, I think, upwards of two feet
high. Some of them had been brought out by artificial incubation--had
been heated, as it were, into existence without maternal aid. These
birds, Bonny said, had been already purchased for 15 pounds sterling
apiece, and were deliverable to the purchaser in six months. They were
fed and guarded all day and housed each evening with tender solicitude
by their Hottentot stepmother, whom the birds evidently regarded as
their own natural parent.

We swept on past the garden, where, on a previous morning, Bonny and I
had killed a deadly green-tree snake upwards of five feet long, and
where, on many other