't lose your temper; guess that 'ere Boer is acting after the
manner of human natur'." And then the owner of the voice turned over and
went to sleep again.

We had over sixty miles to ride that day, and it must have been about
eight o'clock at night, on the sixteenth day of our journey, when
we reached Pretoria and rode straight up to our camp, where we were
heartily greeted. I am sure that some of our friends must have felt a
little disappointed at seeing us arrive healthy and fat, without a sign
of fever, after all their melancholy predictions. It would not have been
"human natur'" if they had not. When we got to the camp, I called out
to Masooku, my Zulu servant, to come and take the horses. Next moment
I heard a rush and a scuttle in the tent like the scrimmage in a
rabbit-burrow when one puts in the ferrets, and Masooku shouted out in
Zulu, "He has come back! by Chaka's head, I swear it! It is his voice,
his own voice, that calls me; my father's, my chief's!"

And so ended one of the hardest and most interesting journeys
imaginable--a journey in which the risk only added to the pleasure.
Still, I should not care to make it again at the same time of year.

VII

A ZULU WAR-DANCE

In all that world-wide empire which the spirit of the English
colonisation has conquered from out of the realms of the distant and
unknown, and added year by year to the English dominions, it is doubtful
whether there be any one spot of corresponding area, presenting so many
large questions, social and political, as the colony of Natal. Wrested
some thirty years ago from the patriarchal Boers, and peopled by a few
scattered scores of adventurous emigrants, Natal has with hard toil
gained for itself a precarious foothold hardly yet to be called an
existence. Known chiefly to the outside world as the sudden birthplace
of those tremendous polemical missiles which battered so fiercely,
some few years ago, against the walls of the English Church, it is now
attracting attention to the shape and proportion of that unsolved riddle
of the future, the Native Question. In those former days of rude and
hand-to-mouth legislation, when the certain evil of the day had to be
met and dealt with before the possible evil of the morrow, the seeds of
great political trouble were planted in the young colony, seeds whose
fruit is fast ripening before our eyes.

When the strong aggressive hand of England has grasped some fresh
portion of the earth's surf