as punctiliously returned, but for the apparition of
a dark figure which crossed the broad space of parade ground
hesitatingly as though not certain of his way, and finally came with
dragging feet through Sanders' garden to the edge of the verandah.

It was the figure of a small boy, very thin; Hamilton could see this
through the half-darkness.

The boy was as naked as when he was born, and he carried in his hand a
single paddle.

"O boy," said Hamilton, "I see you."

"Wanda!" said the boy in a frightened tone, and hesitated, as though he
were deciding whether it would be better to bolt, or to conclude his
desperate enterprise.

"Come up to me," said Hamilton, kindly.

He recognized by the dialect that the visitor had come a long way, as
indeed he had, for his old canoe was pushed up amongst the elephant
grass a mile away from headquarters, and he had spent three days and
nights upon the river. He came up, an embarrassed and a frightened lad,
and stood twiddling his toes on the unaccustomed smoothness of the big
stoep.

"Where do you come from, and why have you come?" asked Hamilton.

"Lord, I have come from the village of M'bisibi," said the boy; "my
mother has sent me because she fears for her life, my father being away
on a great hunt. As for me," he went on, "my name is Tilimi-N'kema."

"Speak on, Tilimi the Monkey," said Hamilton, "tell me why the woman
your mother fears for her life."

The boy was silent for a spell; evidently he was trying to recall the
exact formula which had been dinned into his unreceptive brain, and to
repeat word for word the lesson which he had learned parrotwise.

"Thus says the woman my mother," he said at last, with the blank,
monotonous delivery peculiar to all small boys who have been rehearsed
in speech, "on a certain day when the moon was at full and the rain was
in the forest so that we all heard it in the village, my mother bore a
child who is my own brother, and, lord, because she feared things which
the old man M'bisibi had spoken she went into the forest to a certain
witch doctor, and there the child was born. To my mind," said the lad,
with a curious air of wisdom which is the property of the youthful
native from whom none of the mysteries of life or death are hidden, "it
is better she did this, for they would have made a sacrifice of her
child. Now when she came back, and they spoke to her, she said that the
boy was dead. But this is the truth, lord, that she had