hough the glimpse was, in an instant Leigh
knew his man, and blew a peculiar little reed whistle which Kenyon had
often noticed attached to his friend's watch-chain.

Once! twice! thrice! he sounded the signal, and then, lo! and behold,
every captive on the ground, both white and black, was seen to turn
short in his tracks and speed madly across the wide stretch of open, in
a wild endeavour to reach the distant rock; close behind the crowd
thundered the giant mammal, screaming with rage, and gaining upon the
luckless wights at every step, the tip of his snake-like trunk almost
seeming to touch the hindmost runner. It was an altogether
extraordinary, yet at the same time a very dreadful, sight; and as
Leigh's rifle leaped to his shoulder, he seemed, by one of those curious
tricks which fancy sometimes plays us, to see the Colosseum spread out
before him, its benches packed to suffocation with the pleasure-seekers
of an ancient Roman holiday, and its arena peopled by the noble martyrs
falling beneath the claws of Nero's ravening beasts.

History ever repeats itself, and at this very instant, whilst the
easy-going people of the nineteenth Christian century were sitting
quietly in their peaceful homes, thanking God that such acts and deeds
were for ever at an end, here was the horrid self-same spectacle being
re-enacted in darkest Africa, without any of the added refinements of
modern cruelty, upon the living bodies of their own fellow-men, both
white and black.

Thought, however, is swift, and Leigh's thought delayed him never an
instant, and even as he pressed the trigger and saw the deadly bullet go
homo, and the mighty elephant pitch forward upon his knees, he sprang
upright upon the ledge of rock, to show the captives where their friends
lay hid; then, as his rifle thundered out again, backed up by the echo
of Kenyon's heavy piece, and the discomfited elephant wallowed on the
ground with three shell bullets in his ugly carcass, Leigh was conscious
that Kenyon was slipping down the rock, and quickly following his
friend, both were in an instant busy with their hunting-knives upon the
thongs which held the prisoners, who, twenty-five in number, six white
and the rest black, were all at liberty and eagerly scrambling up the
rock before the mixed assemblage beyond the great enclosure had
thoroughly realised what was going on, less than a thousand yards away,
under cover of the smoke and the rapid discharges of strange r