hey constructed,
placing it at a distance for safety's sake. When most of the surviving
men were away, however, a grass fire set light to this outbuilding and
all the powder blew up.

After this, for a while they supplied the camp with food by the help of
such ammunition as remained to them. When that failed they dug pits in
which to catch game. In time the buck came to know of these pits, so
that they snared no more.

Then, as the "biltong" or sun-dried meat they had made was all consumed,
they were driven to every desperate expedient that is known to the
starving, such as the digging up of bulbs, the boiling of grass, twigs
and leaves, the catching of lizards, and so forth. I believe that they
actually ate caterpillars and earthworms. But after their last fire went
out through the neglect of the wretched Kaffir who was left to watch it,
and having no tinder, they failed to relight it by friction, of course
even this food failed them. When I arrived they had practically been
three days without anything to eat except green leaves and grass, such
as I saw the child chewing. In another seventy hours doubtless every one
of them would have been dead.

Well, they recovered rapidly enough, for those who had survived its
ravages were evidently now impervious to fever. Who can tell the joy
that I experienced as I watched Marie returning from the very brink of
the grave to a state of full and lovely womanhood? After all, we were
not so far away from the primitive conditions of humanity, when the
first duty of man was to feed his women and his children, and I think
that something of that instinct remains with us. At least, I know I
never experienced a greater pleasure than I did, when the woman I loved,
the poor, starving woman, ate and ate of the food which _I_ was able to
give her--she who for weeks had existed upon locusts and herbs.

For the first few days we did not talk much except of the immediate
necessities of the hour, which occupied all our thoughts. Afterwards,
when Marais and his daughter were strong enough to bear it, we had some
conversation. He began by asking how I came to find them.

I replied, through Marie's letter, which, it appeared, he knew nothing
of, for he had forbidden her to write to me.

"It seems fortunate that you were disobeyed, mynheer," I said, to which
he answered nothing.

Then I told the tale of the arrival of that letter at the Mission
Station in the Cape Colony by the hand of a wande