so,' replied Vasco. 'I think I am dying now.'

"'Yes,' answered the father. Your face is becoming gray.
Your throat will rattle in a minute. Look here; this is
what my mother used to do.'

"'And he did thus," said the Vrouw Grobelaar, giving a very
good imitation of the sign of the cross.

"But that was not a bad ending," cried Katje. "I think it
was beautiful. I hope Vasco and the girl went straight to
God."

The Vrouw Grobelaar sighed.

THE PERUVIAN

FROM her pocket Katje produced stealthily a clean-scoured
wish-bone. The Vrouw Grobelaar was sleeping in her chair
with tight-shut eyes. So I took one end of the bone, and we
broke it, and the wish remained with Katje.

"Wish quick," I said.

She puckered her pretty brows with a charming childish
thoughtfulness.

"I can't think of anything to wish for," she answered.

"Wish to be delivered from the sin of playing with
witchcraft and dirty old bones!" The suggestion echoed
roundly in the old lady's deep tones, and we, startled and
abashed, looked up to find her wide awake, and in her
didactic mood. The Vrouw Grobelaar never slept to any real
purpose. One might have remembered that.

"Yes, witchcraft," she pursued. "For if bones are not
witchcraft, tell me what is? When a Hottentot wants to find
a strayed ox, he makes magic with bones, doesn't he? And
the bones of a dead baboon are dangerous things too. Katje,
throw that bone away."

Katje, who hated to be found out, threw it over the rail of
the stoop into the kraal. When the good Vrouw had kept her
steady eye on me for a few seconds, I threw my half after
Katje's.

"I thought so," said the Vrouw Grobelaar, with a twitch of
the lips like a smile stillborn.

"It's only a game," said Katje plaintively. "There's no
harm in it."

The old lady shook her head.

"There's harm in things you don't understand," she
pronounced. "There's harm in failing in love, for
instance, if you don't know what you are doing. But
witchcraft is worse than anything. You've seen how hard it
is to make a Kafir doctor show his tricks. That's because
he's never certain which is master, he or the devil. I knew
a man once, a Peruvian, who burned his fingers badly."

A Peruvian, for the Vrouw Grobelaar, was any one for whose
nationality she had no name. In Johannesburg it means a
Polish Jew; in this instance I believe the man was a Greek.

"He was a smouser" (pedlar), she went on, "a little
cowering man, with a black bea