at he saw that there came with it baboons.
Armies and republics of them; more baboons than he had
thought to exist,--they swooped down on his sprouting lands
and rioted, ate and rooted, trampled and wantoned, with
that kind of bouncing devilishness that not even a Kafir
can correctly imitate. In one night they undid all his work
on five sown morgen of fat land, and with the first wink of
the sun in the east they were back again in their kopjes,
leaving devastation and foulness wherever they passed.

"It was my stepsister's husband that stood on one leg and
cursed like a Jew. He was wrathful as a Hollander that has
been drinking water, and what did not help to make him
content was the fact that hardly anything would avail to
protect his lands. Once the baboons had tasted the
sweetness of the young corn, they would come again and
again, camping in the kloofs overhead as long as anything
remained for them, like a deaf guest. But for all that, he
had no notion of leaving them to plunder at their ease. The
least one can do with an unwelcome visitor is to make him
uncomfortable; and he sent to certain kraals on the farm
for two old Kafirs he had remarked who had the appearance
of cunning old men.

"They came and squatted before him, squirming and
shuffling, as Kafirs do when a white man talks to them. One
was quite a common kind of Kafir, gone a little gray with
age, a tuft of white wool on his chin, and little patches
of it here and there on his head. But the other was a small
twisted yellow man, with no hair at all, and eyes like
little blots of fire on a charred stick; and his arms were
so long and gnarled and lean that he had a bestial look,
like a laborious animal.

"'The baboons have killed the crop on the lower lands,'
said Shadrach, smacking his leg with his sjambok. 'If they
are not checked, they will destroy all the corn on this
farm. What is the way to go about it?'

"The little yellow man was biting his lips and turning a
straw in his hands, and gave no answer, but the other
spoke.

"'I am from Shangaanland,' he said, 'and there, when the
baboons plague us, we have a way with them, a good way.'

"He sneered sideways at his yellow companion as he spoke,
and the look which the latter returned to him was a thing
to shrink from.

"'What is this way?' demanded Shadrach.

"'You must trap a baboon,' explained the old Kafir. 'A
leading baboon, for choice, who has a lot to say in the
government of the troo