er, for which he had little appetite, he
sought his own shakedown couch in the comfortless lumber-room. Then the
storm broke in a countless succession of vivid flashes and deafening
thunder-peals which shook the building to its very foundations; and to
the accompaniment of the deluging roar and rush of the rain upon the
iron roof he fell fast asleep--to dream that he was rescuing countless
numbers of fighting Zulus from the Umgeni Fall, over which a rainbow
made up of blue eyes was striving to lure them.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note 1. "Snake." Zulus are great believers in tutelary spirits, of
which each individual has one or more continually watching over him. To
such they frequently, though not invariably, attribute the form of the
serpent.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note 2. A term of contempt employed by the warlike natives of Zululand
to designate the natives dwelling in Natal. Probably a corruption of
the popular term "Kafir," _ama_ being the plural sign.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

DOWN.

We referred to a change which had come into Anstey's manner as regarded
his intercourse with our young friend. More than once he had returned
to the charge and sounded the latter again as to the probability of his
relatives being willing to invest some funds for him in what he was
pleased to call their joint concern. But Gerard's reply had been
positive and unvarying. So persuaded was he of their inability to do so
that he would not even apply to them. Then it was that Anstey's manner
began to change.

He dropped the intimate, elder-brother kind of tone which had heretofore
characterised their intercourse, and which poor Gerard in his youth and
inexperience had taken for genuine, and for it substituted a
master-and-servant sort of demeanour. He would order Gerard about, here
and there, or send him off on an errand, with a short peremptoriness of
tone as though he were addressing some particularly lazy and useless
native. Or he would always be finding fault--more than hinting that the
other was not worth his salt. Now, all this, to a lad of Gerard's
temperament, was pretty galling. The relations between the pair became
strained to a dangerous tension.

It happened one morning that Gerard was in the tumble-down old stable,
saddling up a horse to start upon some errand for his employer. It was
a clear, still day, and