great artist to his Court, where he spent some years in high honour.

_THE TALE OF ISANDHLWANA AND RORKE'S DRIFT_

[Illustration: A]LTHOUGH but fourteen years have gone by since 1879,
perhaps some people, if they chance to be young, have forgotten about
the Zulus, and the story of our war with them; so, before beginning the
tale of Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift, it may be worth while to tell of
these matters in a few words.

The Zulus live in South-Eastern Africa. Originally they were not one
tribe but many, though the same blood was in them all. Nobody knows
whence they came or who were their forefathers; but they seem to have
sprung from an Arab or Semitic stock, and many of their customs, such as
the annual feast of the first fruits, resemble those of the Jews. At the
beginning of this century there arose a warrior king, called Chaka, who
gathered up the scattered tribes of the Zulus as a woodman gathers
sticks, and as of the frail brushwood the woodman makes a stout faggot,
that none can break, so of these tribes Chaka fashioned a nation so
powerful that no other black people could conquer it.

The deeds of Chaka are too many to write of here. Seldom has there been
a monarch, black or white, so terrible or so absolute, and never perhaps
has a man lived more wicked or more clever. Out of 'nothing,' as the
Kafirs say, he made the Amazulu, or the 'people of heaven,' so
powerful, that before he died he could send out an army of a hundred
thousand men to destroy those whom he feared or hated or whose cattle he
coveted. These soldiers were never beaten; if they dared to turn their
back upon an enemy, however numerous, they were killed when the battle
was done, so that soon they learned to choose death with honour before
the foe in preference to death with shame at the hands of the
executioner. Where Chaka's armies went they conquered, till the country
was swept of people for hundreds of miles in every direction. At length,
after he had killed or been the cause of the violent death of more than
a million human beings, in the year 1828 Chaka's own hour came; for, as
the Zulu proverb says, 'the swimmer is at last borne away by the
stream.' He was murdered by the princes of his house and his body
servant Umbopo or Mopo. But as he lay dying beneath their spear thrusts,
it is said that the great king prophesied of the coming of white men who
should conquer the land that he had won.

'What,' he said, 'do you slay me