ed the corporal, with a look of surprise
at Pringle. "Never fear, sir, but we sal be carefu' o' _them_."

The corporal was as good as his word, for he and his comrades carried
nearly the whole party ashore in safety. But there were others there
who owned no allegiance to the corporal. One of these--a big sallow
Hottentot--chanced to get Jerry, surnamed Goldboy, on his shoulders,
and, either by mischance or design, stumbled and fell, pitching Jerry
over his head, just as another billow from the Indian Ocean was rushing
to the termination of its grand career. It caught Jerry up in a loving
embrace as he rose, and pitched him with a noisy welcome on the shore.

"Weel done, Jerry!" cried Sandy Black, who had just been overturned by
the same wave from the shoulders of a burly Englishman--a previously
landed settler--"you an' me's made an impressive landin'. Come, let's
git oot o' the bustle."

So saying the stout Lowlander seized his little English friend by the
arm and dragged him towards the town of canvas which had within a few
weeks sprung up like mushrooms among the sandhills.

Although wet from head to foot, each forgot his condition in the
interest awakened by the strange sights and sounds around him. Their
immediate neighbourhood on the beach was crowded with emigrants, as
party after party was carried ashore shoulder-high by the soldiers, who
seemed to regard the whole affair as a huge practical joke.

The noise was indescribable, because compound. There was the boisterous
hilarity of people who felt their feet once more on solid ground, after
a long and weary voyage; the shouting of sailors and bargemen in the
boats, and of soldiers and natives on the beach; the talking and
laughing of men and women who had struck up sudden friendships on
landing, as well as of those who had crossed the sea together; the
gambolling and the shrieking delight of children freed from the
restraints of shipboard; the shouts of indignant Government officials
who could not get their orders attended to; the querulous demands of
people whose luggage had gone astray in process of debarkation; the
bawling of colonial Dutch by gigantic Dutch-African farmers, in
broad-brimmed hats and leathern crackers, with big tobacco-pipes in
their mouths; the bellowing of oxen in reply to the pistol-shot cuts
applied to their flanks by half-naked Hottentots and Bushmen, whose
whips were bamboos of twenty feet or so in length, with lashes twice as