d let the things of the moment impinge
on him, and fall off again as they would, without much reflection.
But tonight on the kopje he fell to thinking, and his thoughts shaped
themselves into connected chains.

He wondered first whether his mother would ever get the letter he had
posted the week before, and whether it would be brought to her cottage
or she would go to the post office to fetch it. And then, he fell to
thinking of the little English village where he had been born, and where
he had grown up. He saw his mother's fat white ducklings creep in and
out under the gate, and waddle down to the little pond at the back of
the yard; he saw the school house that he had hated so much as a
boy, and from which he had so often run away to go a-fishing, or
a-bird's-nesting. He saw the prints on the school house wall on which
the afternoon sun used to shine when he was kept in; Jesus of Judea
blessing the children, and one picture just over the door where he hung
with his arms stretched out and the blood dropping from his feet. Then
Peter Halket thought of the tower at the ruins which he had climbed so
often for birds' eggs; and he saw his mother standing at her cottage
gate when he came home in the evening, and he felt her arms round his
neck as she kissed him; but he felt her tears on his cheek, because he
had run away from school all day; and he seemed to be making apologies
to her, and promising he never would do it again if only she would not
cry. He had often thought of her since he left her, on board ship, and
when he was working with the prospectors, and since he had joined the
troop; but it had been in a vague way; he had not distinctly seen and
felt her. But tonight he wished for her as he used to when he was
a small boy and lay in his bed in the next room, and saw her shadow
through the door as she bent over her wash-tub earning the money which
was to feed and clothe him. He remembered how he called her and she came
and tucked him in and called him "Little Simon," which was his second
name and had been his father's, and which she only called him when he
was in bed at night, or when he was hurt.

He sat there staring into the blaze. He resolved he would make a great
deal of money, and she should live with him. He would build a large
house in the West End of London, the biggest that had ever been seen,
and another in the country, and they should never work any more.

Peter Halket sat as one turned into stone, sta