"Right front room!" he his head was a British soldier's yelled. helmet. Holt put up his hand. As he ran on he at first wondered why the Major had not told him about this. He then blessed the bad knot which had caused a slab to fall and so delayed his last journey from the river. But these points did not long claim his attention. His thoughts turned to the miserable little piece of shiny black cord he had last seen spitting fire on to the varnished surface of a walnut-wood harmoniumcase. And he could not help making a lightning but futile calculation, based on the distance between the house and the spot where he had turned back, and the time in which he had once won the "Under Fifteen" hundred yards. The infernal thing was burning all right he could see the thread of smoke trickling up the doorframe. Throwing open the back door, he rushed straight down the passage to the front door, opened that, and burst into the room on the right. In the centre of the room was a table upon which stood some crockery and the remains of a meal, and on the far side of the table, facing the stove, was an arm-chair. Above the back of the chair trembled and nodded a grey slouch hat with a rusty crape-band round the crown. A small boy of about six was sitting on the floor, close to the door. He was playing with a regulation mess-tin, and on 1 You must not be afraid. "1 "Jij moet nie bang wees nie," shouted Holt, as he seized the surprised child, who, startled at being whisked off the ground by some unseen force, and not at all reassured by its efforts to speak the Taal, at once let out a yell of terror. Heaving the table into the corner of the room with his thigh, Holt darted across to the chair and dumped the child on the top of an old man seated in it. Then, with the caution "Hou vas!" 2 he steadied the two occupants with one arm, tipped the chair slightly back, and dragged the yelling, creaking mass across the floor, out of the room, over the lintel of the front door and down on to the ground outside. The child shrieked all the more at sight of his captor, and severely belaboured the old man, who was too astonished or winded to do more than gurgle. The breathless Holt continued his retrograde movement across the apology for a garden. About thirty yards was prevented by circum- racing round in a circle, stances from studying the hypnotised. As he gazed, a effect of his work from a belated fowl's leg-which had nearer point of view than any evidently made a long journey he had ever occupied before. -hit him on the cheek, and an First the flat roof of the angry cock crowed at him. house rose gently a couple of feet into the air; then the walls quivered and dissolved into their components; lastly, the roof sat down squarely upon the ruins with a flop, propelling outwards in every direction a mighty puff of dust, as does a lexicon dropped on to an unswept floor. Its fall revealed a secret, for there arose an appalling cackle, and amidst the debris which rained down from the cloud of white dust and grey smoke descended a shower of fowls. Some sailed down, wings flapping, and ran hither and thither with hideous clamour; others fell with a heavy thud, inert and limp. The shock of the explosion silenced the boy's cries for the moment. But, freed from his weight and Holt's constricting clutch, the rattled old man old man was galvanised into what might have been either a fit of coughing or a stream of guttural exclamations of surprise and terror. Both had rolled clear of their deliverer. Nevertheless, Holt still lay prone, half-stunned and thoroughly winded. When he raised himself on his elbows, dazed, and coughing in the choking air, he saw sitting up, facing him, a strange, hairy old man and a boy. The air was thick with feathers; nearbye lay two dead birds; whilst others still full of life were The anti-climax was too sudden. He began to chuckle feebly. And when, limping up through the murk, there appeared 8 naked, dustsmeared man, who stooped down every few strides to collect a dead bird, he rocked with laughter in spite of his bruised and aching body. It was not until Digby had picked him up, shaken him, and used much strong language, that he began faintly to appreciate the situation. He then seized the boy by the hand, and between them the two officers half-supported, half-forced the old Boer towards the bank, their progress in the direction of shelter hastened by the frequency of certain humming noises in the air. It was not very long before the worthy Stimson was hauling the boat back across the river. He was greatly relieved by Holt's safe return, but still somewhat sore at the verbal castigation he had received from the naked and dirty robber of hen-roosts now sitting by a heap of poultry in the bows. Amongst the birds was the child, who had recovered from shock sufficiently to recommence howling. Aft, sitting next Holt, was the old Boer, now querulous. Holt sat silent, thoughtful, and puzzled, his aching head between his hands. Holt looked up and listened to the next repetition of the sentence. For him the last twenty up growsing." As he spoke he minutes had been somewhat crossed one bleeding foot over crowded with incident, and he his knee and tried to pick out was still trying to collect his some of the sharp-pointed wits, scattered by the fall. pieces of grit sticking into the From the bows the shivering sole. dragoon regarded the pair of human beings who had just been saved, one near the end of his life, the other at the threshold. And he mused on the strangeness of the chance which had led him to discover from a casual remark of the Major's that Holt had not been informed of their presence in the house. He was deeply grateful. He was not ungrateful also that the old Boer had been so cunning as to keep his poultry on the roof. "Oh, he's mad-talking out of the back of his neck. Wants to know what we've done with some furniture and a harmonium!" "Schelms!" wheezed the old fellow. "Ja. Schelms!" echoed a shrill voice. "Wat het jij met mij Seraphein gemaak?" and as the small speaker hit the nearest of his brutal preservers in the face with the blood-stained carcase of pullet, he added, "Verdomde Karki!" By now the sounds of battle had grown more distinct; and while this chip of the old block fought for his grandfather's household gods with a dead fowl the unseen messengers of his compatriots sighed and wailed overhead. IN THE WAKE OF THE WESTERN SHEEP. To the idyllic mind the sheep is the symbol of innocence, gentle and trustful, and is emblematic of all things sweetly pastoral; to the naturalist it is Ovis laticaudatus, herbivorous mammal of the Ruminantia order, highly interesting in its four-stomached physiological structure, &c., &c.; to the woolman or the dealer it represents merely so many pounds avoirdupois of hirsute fibre or of human food; but to me, while associated with the animal in life, it was but a brute, a tiresome, bleaty, stupid, troublesome brute, upon four rambling dust-raising feet. Picture yourself linked to three thousand and odd half-bred Merino muttons, as it behoves a lone camp-herder to be, day and night, week in, week out, for months at a stretch, in the heat of a south-western American summer, and then size up your impression of the sheep. It will perhaps coincide with mine. At times I try to imagine I am something of a philosopher, but when I found myself set down, ten miles from human habitation, right on the expansive bosom of an undulating wilderness, in company with those Merinos, and when I contemplated the meagreness of my seven-foot tent, with its contents of one miniature cookstove, one child's size sleepingcot, and a limited selection of plain food stores, as a set-off to the grand howling lone someness of that skyline-framed picture, I mueh doubted if I was of the Stoic school at least. Marooned! That word tersely expressed my feelings on the situation as I looked about me and saw the white top of the prairie schooner which had conveyed my modest camping outfit to the spot, rapidly sinking hulldown on the distant horizon, on its return to headquarters. After all, man is for the most part a socially inclined gregarious animal; and even the sight of my woolly companions, alive and numerous as they were, scattered over about half a mile of the unlimited leagues of scenery, did not afford me much comfort. Though I had been somehow pitchforked into the position of their guardian, I was but a short time out of the city, and as yet I knew but little of matters ovine, nor had I yet learned to love the creatures. Moreover, I was a stranger to the remote melancholy and the slow and simple life of the wild and woolly west. In Wyoming and certain other western American States there is a law prohibiting solitary sheep-herding. It appears to have been found that the solitary life had a tendency to cause deterioration or disturbance of the grey matter in the brains of some who followed the occupation too long at a time. Statistics do not chronicle the exact form of insanity with which the unfortunate are prone to be afflicted, nor do they give, as the actual reason of the trouble, the isolation and monotony of the existence, nor do they state if the close and constant association with the sheep itself has anything to do with the matter. "A man is part of all that he has seen." With such continuous juxtaposition to sheep, and seeing so much of them, to the exclusion of everything else having them rubbed into him, in fact, for it must be realised that the herder on the plains is always practically in their midst, even having to sleep so close to them that the sound of their habitual sniffings and coughings and sputterings hangs ever in his ear, is it not just reasonable to suppose that his mind may, after a while, take on a touch of their supreme imbecility? If this latter is really in any way accountable for the insanity alleged, it would be interesting to know if the superlative silliness of the halfbred Merino is not, to a higher degree than that of some other strains, contagious to the human, or if the complaint developed therefrom is any more hopeless in its nature. Two weeks of herding in the immediate neighbourhood of the ranche, and a couple of count-outs during that period, had satisfied the owners that I might be relied upon as a flockmaster, for the countings had proved eminently satisfactory. My private opinion was that this was due more to chance, or the design of a kind Providence, than to my own merits as a shepherd. On several occasions I had, as I thought, folded the flock all right at dusk, when I found to my horror five hundred or so that I had inadvertently let stray from the main gang during the day come rolling home on their own account in the small hours of the morning. Thirty-five hundred is a lot of sheep. Even the skilled Mexican considers it so, and protests that such a number is "too mucho mucho carneros for one man. When they get spread in skirmishing array, in their deployed files and strings, and their clusters, squads, and outposts, over their grazing territory, especially where there are any brush coverts, it takes a more experienced eye than mine to judge if all are there. Some border Mexicans allege that they can tell each individual sheep in a big flock, after being a few days in charge. A personal acquaintance, however, with the character of the individual Greaser making such assertion is absolutely necessary ere allowing his statement to go on record as a fact. The herder of that ilk is wont, as a class, to handle the truth somewhat carelessly, or, as the cowboy graphically puts it, "A derned Greaser can turn loose a lie big enough to wear a brand.” Still, trusting to luck to vouchsafe a continuance of pastoral assistance, I had kept my own counsel about things, and had retained my job. Then the lone camp idea had been suddenly sprung on me, and here I was. After a little |