his supper, while he kept up an incessant run
of small-chat with Booby and Jemalee. The latter replied to him chiefly
with grave smiles, the former with shouts of appreciative laughter.

"He _is_ funny," asserted Mrs McTavish, "and uncommonly noisy. I doubt
if there is much good in him."

"More than you think, Mopsy," said Kenneth (by this irreverent name did
the Highlander call his better-half); "Jerry Goldboy is a small package,
but he's made of good stuff, depend upon it. No doubt he's a little
nervous, but I've observed that his nerves are tried more by the
suddenness with which he may be surprised than by the actual danger he
may chance to encounter. On our first night out, when he roused the
camp and smashed the stock of his blunderbuss, no doubt I as well as
others thought he showed the white feather, but there was no lack of
courage in him when he went last week straight under the tree where the
tiger was growling, and shot it so dead that when it fell it was not far
from his feet."

"I heard some of the men, papa," observed Jessie, "say that it was Dutch
courage that made him do that. What did they mean by Dutch courage?"

Jessie, being little more than eight, was ignorant of much of the
world's slang.

"Cape-smoke, my dear," answered her father, with a laugh.

"Cape-smoke?" exclaimed Jessie, "what is that?"

"Brandy, child, peach-brandy, much loved by some of the boers, I'm told,
and still more so by the Hottentots; but there was no more Cape-smoke in
Jerry that day than in you. It was true English pluck. No doubt he
could hardly fail to make a dead shot at so close a range, with such an
awful weapon, loaded, as it usually is, with handfuls of slugs,
buckshot, and gravel; but it was none the less plucky for all that. The
old flint-lock might have missed fire, or he mightn't have killed the
brute outright, and in either case he knew well enough it would have
been all up with Jerry Goldboy."

"Who's that taking my name in vain?" said Jerry himself, passing the
tent at the moment, in company with Sandy Black.

"We were only praising you, Jerry," cried Jessie, with a laugh, "for the
way in which you shot that tiger the other day."

"It wasn't a teeger, Miss Jessie," interposed Sandy Black, "it was only
a leopard--ane o' thae wee spottit beasts that they're sae prood o' in
this country as to _ca'_ them teegers."

"Come, Sandy," cried Jerry Goldboy, "don't rob me of the honour that is
my due.