notice of our enemies. We
divided into three parties, Captain Gilby, his wife, and Mrs Wilkinson
chose the path by the seashore; Captain Piers, Mr and Miss Gregg,
endeavoured to follow the route taken by the party several weeks before;
while Colonel Harrison took Miss Hordern and myself under his charge.
The Colonel had some knowledge of the colony, and knew that the best
hope of escape lay towards the north, where there were but few tribes
located, and an almost endless screen of forest.

"We took leave of one another only an hour after we had come to this
resolution, as the danger was growing every moment more imminent. I
never heard with any certainty what became of the rest of the party; but
a report once reached me that Miss Gregg (so I call her, though, as I
have said before, I give none of the real names), after the murder of
her brother and Captain Piers, had to submit to something of the same
fate as myself. But this was only a rumour. Of the fate of Captain
Gilby and his wife, I never heard anything.

"As regards ourselves, we were fortunate enough entirely to escape
pursuit, and after three days of intense anxiety and fatigue, had
reached a part of the forest which lay beyond the haunts of the tribes,
by which we had been attacked. We were now compelled to rest awhile,
and recover our strength. But though Miss Hordern and myself, who were
both of us of a hardy constitution, soon rallied from the fatigues we
had undergone, the old Colonel could not. He grew daily weaker in spite
of all our care of him, and at last died, to our inexpressible grief.
We laid his remains in an empty pit which we had found, and filled it in
as well as we could, with clods and stones. We then set off--two poor
desolate women--to find our way as well as we could to some place of
shelter.

"The toil we underwent, and the perils, which by a miracle we contrived
to avoid, would fill a volume, if I were to relate them. But it will be
enough to say that, after endless wanderings, we found ourselves at last
somewhere about fifty or sixty miles from the banks of the Gariep--at no
very great distance, in fact, from this present spot. We had subsisted
chiefly on the fruits that grow in abundance throughout the whole of the
country, and were beginning to hope that, after all, we might reach the
outlying Dutch farms of which Colonel Harrison had spoken, when another
calamity befell us. Miss Hordern and myself were one day suddenly