again and talking among themselves. Not daring
to think what they would do next, she stood hearkening,
with the great gun on her arm. At length came a sound that
froze the blood in her body. She heard the sheet-iron on
the roof grate as it was dragged off. Then she dropped the
gun at her feet and knew that her time was come.

"I cannot tell you in so many words what she did in the
next minutes, for my tongue refuses the tale. But the
Kafirs did not get into the house. By this time the news of
their doings was gone abroad, and as the roof was being
taken off the house, some Burghers arrived with guns, and
with them my husband. Of course they shot most of the
Kafirs that they could find, and then, being unable to get
any answer to their shouts, they broke in the door of the
house and entered.

"My husband used to weep as he told of what they found. The
Vrouw Coetzee was sitting in a chair, smiling with her eyes
closed, and her baby was lying in the crutch of her left
arm. Her right hand was on his little soft throat--his face
blue and swollen, and his little arms stretched out with
tight closed fists. He was quite dead, but warm yet, for he
had missed life by but a few minutes.

"No, the Vrouw Coetzee was not dead. She died a year after;
but all that while she went witless, always smiling and
seeming to look for something.

"So you see that, after all, a Kafir is--Katje, what are you
crying about?"

PIET NAUDE'S TREK

On Sunday afternoons the Vrouw Grobelaar's household gave
itself up, unwillingly enough, to religious exercises. The
girls retired to their rooms in company with the works of
certain well-meaning but inexpressibly dreary authors, and
it is to be inferred they read them with profit. The
children sat around the big room with Bibles, their task
being to learn by heart one of the eight-verse
articulations of the 119th Psalm, while the old lady
meditated in her armchair and maintained discipline. Those
were stern times for the young students: to fidget in one's
seat was to court calamity; even to scratch oneself was a
risky experiment. David got little credit as a bard in that
assembly.

But the work once done, the stumbling recitation dared and
achieved, there were compensations, for the Vrouw Grobelaar
was then approachable for a story. To be sure, the Sunday
afternoon stories were known to all the children almost by
heart, but what good tale will not bear repetition? The
history of Piet Naud