sing the knife our darling might have been bitten. Oh! I do
dread these snakes, they go about in such a sneaking way, and are so
very deadly. I often wonder that accidents are not more frequent,
considering the numbers of them that are about."

"So do I, Mrs Brook," returned Dobson; "but I suppose it is owing to
the fact that snakes are always most anxious to keep out of man's way,
and few men are as bold as your Junkie. I never heard of one being
collared before, though a friend of mine whom I met on my last visit to
the karroo used sometimes to catch hold of a snake by the tail, whirl it
round his head, and dash its brains out against a tree."

"You'll stay with us to-day, Dobson!" said Brook.

Frank, involuntarily casting a glance at the pretty face of Gertie--who
had by that time attained to the grace of early womanhood,--accepted the
invitation, and that day at dinner entertained the family with graphic
accounts of his experiences among the wild beasts of the Great Fish
River jungles, and dilated on his prospects of making a fortune by
trading in ivory. "If that foolish law," he said, "had not been made by
our Governor, prohibiting traffic with the Kafirs, I could get
waggon-loads of elephants' tusks from them for an old song. As it is, I
must knock over the elephants for myself--at least until the laws in
question are rescinded."

"The Governor seems to have a special aptitude," said Brook, with a
clouded brow, "not only for framing foolish laws, but for abrogating
good ones."

The Governor referred to was Lord Charles Somerset, who did more to
retard the progress of the new settlements on the frontiers of Kafirland
than any who have succeeded him. Having complicated the relations of
the colonists and Kafirs, and confused as well as disgusted, not to say
astonished, the natives during his first term of office, he went to
England on leave of absence, leaving Sir Rufane Shaw Donkin to act as
Governor in his place.

Lord Charles seems to have been a resentful as well as an incapable man,
for immediately after his return to the colony in 1821 he overturned the
policy of the acting Governor, simply because he and Sir Rufane were at
personal enmity. The colony at that time, and the Home Government
afterwards, approved of the wise measures of the latter. He had
arranged the military forces on the frontier so as to afford the new
settlers the greatest possible amount of protection; the Cape corps men
had b