with a Martini rifle
at three hundred yards, I should almost have said that this was an
impossible tale."

Here Good looked up with an air of indignant innocence.

"However," he went on, rising and lighting his pipe, "if you fellows
like, I will spin you a yarn. I was telling one of you the other night
about those three lions and how the lioness finished my unfortunate
'voorlooper,' Jim-Jim, the boy whom we buried in the bread-bag.

"Well, after this little experience I thought that I would settle down a
bit, so I entered upon a venture with a man who, being of a speculative
mind, had conceived the idea of running a store at Pretoria upon
strictly cash principles. The arrangement was that I should find
the capital and he the experience. Our partnership was not of a long
duration. The Boers refused to pay cash, and at the end of four months
my partner had the capital and I had the experience. After this I came
to the conclusion that store-keeping was not in my line, and having
four hundred pounds left, I sent my boy Harry to a school in Natal, and
buying an outfit with what remained of the money, started upon a big
trip.

"This time I determined to go further afield than I had ever been
before; so I took a passage for a few pounds in a trading brig that
ran between Durban and Delagoa Bay. From Delagoa Bay I marched inland
accompanied by twenty porters, with the idea of striking up north,
towards the Limpopo, and keeping parallel to the coast, but at a
distance of about one hundred and fifty miles from it. For the first
twenty days of our journey we suffered a good deal from fever, that is,
my men did, for I think that I am fever proof. Also I was hard put to
it to keep the camp in meat, for although the country proved to be very
sparsely populated, there was but little game about. Indeed, during all
that time I hardly killed anything larger than a waterbuck, and, as you
know, waterbuck's flesh is not very appetising food. On the twentieth
day, however, we came to the banks of a largish river, the Gonooroo it
was called. This I crossed, and then struck inland towards a great range
of mountains, the blue crests of which we could see lying on the distant
heavens like a shadow, a continuation, as I believe, of the Drakensberg
range that skirts the coast of Natal. From this main range a great spur
shoots out some fifty miles or so towards the coast, ending abruptly in
one tremendous peak. This spur I discovered separated