is family? They would never get on as they were. The
best thing they could do was to throw it up and clear, and, for
themselves, the sooner the better. And for me? Well, exactly. It was
there that the uneasiness came in.

The sun was dipping to the great bush-clad ridge up the side of the
Tugela valley, and the wide sweep of forest beneath was alight with a
golden glow from the still ardent horizontal shafts. Innumerable doves
fluttered and cooed around, balancing themselves on mimosa sprays, or
the spiky heads of the plumed euphorbia; or dashing off to wing an
arrow-like flight somewhere else, alarmed by the tread of horse-hoofs or
the snort and champ at a jingling bit. Here and there a spiral of blue
smoke, where a native kraal in its neat circle stood pinnacled upon the
jut of some mighty spur, and the faint far voices of its inhabitants
raised in musical cattle calls, came, softened by distance, a pleasing
and not unmelodious harmony with the evening calm. Downward and
downward wound the path, and lo, as the sun kissed the far ridge, ere
diving beyond it, a final and parting beam shot full upon the face of a
great krantz, causing it to flush in red flame beneath the gold and
green glow of its forest fringed crest. All those evenings! I think it
must be something in their sensuous and magic calm that permeates the
soul of those whose lot has once been cast in these lands, riveting it
in an unconscious bondage from which it can never quite free itself;
binding it for all time to the land of its birth or adoption. I, for
one, Godfrey Glanton, rough and ready prosaic trader in the Zulu, with
no claim to sentiment or poetry in my composition, can fully recognise
that the bond is there. And yet, and yet--is there a man living, with
twenty years' experience of a wandering life, now in this, now in that,
section of this wonderful half continent, who can honestly say he has no
poetry in him? I doubt it.

The wild guinea fowl were cackling away to their roosts and the shrill
crow of francolins miauw-ed forth from the surrounding brake as I
dismounted to open a gate in the bush fence which surrounded what the
Major called his "compound." As I led my horse on--it was not worth
while remounting--a sound of voices--something of a tumult of voices,
rather--caught my ear.

"Good Heavens! Another row!" I said to myself. "What impossible
people these are!"

For I had recognised an altercation, and I had recognise