cout
along a low range of hills, and had lost his way. Since eight in the
morning he had wandered among long grasses, and ironstone kopjes, and
stunted bush, and had come upon no sign of human habitation, but the
remains of a burnt kraal, and a down-trampled and now uncultivated
mealie field, where a month before the Chartered Company's forces had
destroyed a native settlement.

Three times in the day it had appeared to him that he had returned to
the very spot from which he had started; nor was it his wish to travel
very far, for he knew his comrades would come back to look for him, to
the neighbourhood where he had last been seen, when it was found at the
evening camping ground that he did not appear.

Trooper Peter Halket was very weary. He had eaten nothing all day; and
had touched little of the contents of a small flask of Cape brandy
he carried in his breast pocket, not knowing when it would again be
replenished.

As night drew near he determined to make his resting place on the top of
one of the kopjes, which stood somewhat alone and apart from the others.
He could not easily be approached there, without his knowing it. He had
not much fear of the natives; their kraals had been destroyed and their
granaries burnt for thirty miles round, and they themselves had fled:
but he feared, somewhat, the lions, which he had never seen, but of
which he had heard, and which might be cowering in the long grasses and
brushwood at the kopje's foot:--and he feared, vaguely, he hardly knew
what, when he looked forward to his first long night alone in the veld.

By the time the sun had set he had gathered a little pile of stumps and
branches on the top of the kopje. He intended to keep a fire burning all
night; and as the darkness began to settle down he lit it. It might
be his friends would see it from far, and come for him early in the
morning; and wild beasts would hardly approach him while he knelt beside
it; and of the natives he felt there was little fear.

He built up the fire; and determined if it were possible to keep awake
the whole night beside it.

He was a slight man of middle height, with a sloping forehead and pale
blue eyes: but the jaws were hard set, and the thin lips of the large
mouth were those of a man who could strongly desire the material good of
life, and enjoy it when it came his way. Over the lower half of the face
were scattered a few soft white hairs, the growth of early manhood.

From time to