bean]. I have an Irish doctor with me who makes good medicine out of it for my sickness."

Van Enter grew interested. Next to the Predikant, the Boer respects the doctor, and is often more willing to hear of a new physic than of a cure by faith and prayer.

"Have you seen any elandsboontje?" Hartley went on, well knowing that the plant was very rare in that region. "We have been told that there is a kind hereabouts worth all the others."

Van Enter was completely bluffed. He came up to the waggon, which had stopped, shook hands with grave respect with Wilmot the Irish doctor, accepted a soupie of brandy, and entered into general conversation. All the time he was eyeing the gear. "What is that?" at last he asked.

Hartley told the story made to fit the load.

"Whose farm are you going to prospect?" was the next question.

Hartley was not prepared for this, and mentioned a name haphazard.

Van Enter was puzzled. He knew, he said, every Boer in the district mentioned, but had never heard of Eckbout.

"He is in Pretoria. He went to fight Jameson," Hartley explained.

"What were you doing when Jameson came in?" was the next embarrassing question. "Prospecting on the East

Rand."

"And your friend the doctor, where was he?"

Van Enter rode off to prepare his wife for the visit, while Wilmot got ready the physic, without which academic qualifications counted for nothing. He made up a big bottleful of a harmless liquid compounded of liquorice, cayenne pepper, Worcester sauce, and salt. It contained all the external essentials of good physic, being black, thick, and nauseous, and, doubtless, equally efficacious for internal and external application.

Hartley and Wilmot rode over after their oxen had been outspanned and the midday meal disposed of. They found the usual multitudinous family of barefooted children, as healthy as dirty, who for the most part dodged the ceremony of handshaking, probably in awe of the doctor and his art. Mrs Van Enter, fat and ponder

ous, lay curled up on the bedding that covered the bottom of the covered waggon. She listened apathetically to her husband's description of the doctor's abilities, and began a long recital of her ailments since marriage. Hartley interpreted with a perfectly straight face, and sotto voce advised that the administration of the physic be postponed to the last.

"These Boers watch the effect of first doses very carefully, and if anything should happen-well, we had better not be near."

The proceedings had been overlooked through a tear in the tilt-cloth by a bulky girl of about seventeen, who presently showed herself at the front of the waggon.

"Mother," said she, "you are verneuked. This is no real doctor. It is Cecil Rhodes and Dr Jameson. Look!" and she thrust into her mother's face a portrait of the great man cut from an English illustrated

paper.

The announcement of the presence of a puff- adder in the bed would not have caused more consternation. The woman stared from the picture to Hartley, and shrank back as if she feared he would strike her. Her husband gave one glance at the portrait, then put a hand on Hartley's shoulder.

"Are you Rhodes?" he demanded; "for if you be, then this doctor must be Jameson."

Wilmot was startled; for though he understood no Taal, the production of the portrait

gave him a clue to what was happening. Hartley preserved his self-control: he was fully alive to the menace of the danger.

"If I were the millionaire Rhodes, should I be on trek with a rotten old waggon and a span of poor oxen?" he asked quietly.

The objection was invincible. The wealth of Rhodes was proverbial, and wealth to a Boer always took the concrete form of good cattle and a brandnew gaily painted waggon. Van Enter had commented on the ramshackle appearance of Smeer's transport plant. He turned to his daughter.

"You are foolish, Kaatje. Rhodes has much money. What would he be doing with a span like that?"

"But the Burghers took all his transport at Doornkop. It is Rhodes running away to Delagoa," the girl protested with angry insistence.

The situation looked serious, for this new argument weighed with Van Enter, as feminine logic ever does with a Boer. Did you ever hear that Rhodes could talk the Taal as I do? And what should Rhodes be doing here when he has all Cape Colony to move about in?" Hartley asked.

Van Enter was still doubtful. The outside Boer had only partially awakened from the nightmare terrors of the Raid, and though the event was four months old, it was being discussed in the remote districts as if it were the sensation of the previous week.

"Suppose I were Rhodes,"

Hartley continued, "should I not make you sell me your waggon and oxen, which are so much better than mine? Instead of that, I do not even tell you I want them. I let my doctor physic your vrouw, and I give you a soupie of good brandy, taking nothing from you. Does that look like Rhodes?"

Van Enter began to be impressed. The Boer conception of the character of the Colossus had been well presented.

"And you talk of likenesses. Many a foolish fellow has taken me for Rhodes, but I am not so nearly like him as you are to a Boer who stole my horse by Ermelo last year."

Van Enter looked uneasy for a few moments; then the humour of the situation appealed to him, for he laughed, and Hartley knew that danger was past, since laughter kills the reason in an Afrikander.

all

Within ten minutes Van Enter had produced his bottle of carefully conserved dop brandy, Wilmot had administered a half-pint of his physic to the vrouw, who took it with the nonchalance and ease of a confirmed hypochondriac, and all parted as friends.

Van Enter had invited Hartley to join forces with him and trek along the same route. The Yorkshireman quite appreciated the advantage of travelling under the escort of a Burgher known in and knowing the district, and would have been glad to accept the offer. But the progress of a Boer on trek with his flocks

In order to allay any lingering suspicion on the part of the Boer, Hartley accepted his escort through the last dorp on the line of march, but was careful to make no stay there ; for dorp officialdom, having plenty of time on its hands, might prove inquisitive. Hartley did not feel comfortable till he was outspanned six miles beyond the dorp. He sent Smeer and the Kafirs back to make such purchases as were necessary, and took advantage of the dying moon to work a trek that put twenty miles between him and the representatives of Pretoria.

The country had again become uniformly wild and difficult, and a late rain had softened and cut up the roads into morass or gully. The oxen began to give up, and longer and more frequent rests and shorter treks were imperative.

The waits gave Wilmot ample opportunity for gratifying his exploratory instinct by rides off the track in quest of game and topographical enlightenment. Hartley still strongly opposed these solitary excur sions, and by way of deterrent told many stories of new-comers, and even old hands, being left to die in the veld as the result of a broken limb obtained while scaling some rugged height. Veld lore has hundreds of these records, all sufficiently tragic to need no embellishment.

As they struck the road that

led to the once famous goldfields of the Murchison Range, they came upon an object-lesson in one of the most pathetic memorials ever erected over a nameless grave. Beneath a large thorn - tree was a heap of stones, almost breast-high, which tradition says marks the resting-place of an unknown white man, who, with a native servant, was prospecting and hunting in this region in the early Eighties. He died from the effect of some such accident as Hartley prophesied for Wilmot. Evidently the Kafir had possessed a larger share of the virtue of gratitude than is usually accredited to his race, for he had carved on the trunk of the tree in large rude letters this simple tribute to his dead master

GOOD BAAS.

The district contains many uninscribed memorials to the unknown wardens of the Empire who have fallen by the way, whose memory lives only in some distant home beyond the seas, or perchance in the breasts of the companions of the trek, who passed through the most heartrending of travails that friendship can suffer, -watching one die to whom no help can be given, then digging his lonely grave and leaving him to the eternal solitude of the wilderness. Twice had Hartley undergone this ordeal, and the sight of these tragic reminders of the shadows of the veld depressed him for the rest of that day.

"Wilmot," said he, as the two sat smoking under the

He jerked his pipe in the direction where Smeer was sleeping wrapped in his blankets.

"I'll see it through, Dick; but there's no occasion to talk of pegging out."

It

"I've got to finish up somewhere; why not now? would be like my luck to knock under just as I had pulled off the biggest thing in my life."

This was the first time Hartley had made any reference to what Wilmot had long since guessed was an understanding between him and Clarie. He felt encouraged encouraged to put а question

"I suppose if it's not a funeral here, it will be a marriage there?"

Hartley replied quite frankly: "Yes, it's all fixed up. At any rate, I think it is, or it would be if I was not such an ass when it comes to talking to women. Look here"-he became very earnest "I don't know whether it's the same with other chaps, but when I'm away from Clarie I can think of all sorts of things I want to say to her, and the proper way to say them, but I'm hanged if it doesn't all slip away as soon as I get within

range, and I can only drivel. Rum, isn't it? I can say what's on my mind to men, and I have told the wife of an up-country canteen-keeper what I thought of her cooking and her dirty bedroom, but as soon as I get with Clarie I'm frozen." "How did you manage with -the other one?"

"Don't talk of her. She was not the same class as Clarie. Man, but it makes me wicked when I think what a fool I was over her. You see, she was the first good-looking woman that I had seen in the country,women of any kind were scarce on the Rand in those days, and I suppose I was a bit of a griffin. But it served me right. Her bolting with the marriagepresents was rough on me, as I had to pay for them all. It made me look a fool. Yes, I could talk to her all right: not that I had much chance, she did all that; there was no shyness about her. But never mind her. What about you? Who gets your pile if anything happens? Hendrika?"

Wilmot laughed. "A man doesn't leave a fortune to the first girl that amuses him."

Hartley looked up quickly, then puffed at his pipe and relit it sure sign of mental perturbation.

"She amuses you, eh? Is there any one else?" "Yes, my mother. her a bit."

I owe

Hartley seemed relieved, and the hard, angry look that usually prefaced trouble melted.

"Now you talk sense. Like to hear a chap talk of his

During the next few days Hartley became curiously morose. He was in a morbid humour, that manifested itself in captious criticism of everything South African, and railing against the fate which had bound him to the country. It is a psychological condition that most home-born Colonials suffer from at times, and its effect on the new-comer, keenly appreciative of his new environment, is irritating and depressing. The prospect of being able to return to the homeland seemed to have intensified the seamy side of the life that had been his for twenty years. Wilmot found him a sore impediment to the full enjoyment of an experience that stirred the spirit of adventure latent in the breast of the British boy-and Wilmot was little more. Hartley took a malicious delight in deprecating all those phases of the life of the veld that charmed his impressionable companion. He refused to see either sense or pleasure in Wilmot's fondness for squatting over a camp-fire that only repaid the toil of feeding it by belching its smoke and flame in his face with every gust. If he did come near it, it was because the smoke drove away the swarms of winged insects that made it impossible to burn a lamp under the stuffy waggontent. He refused to eat the buck shot with so much toil by Wilmot because it was taste