buck someday?"

"Why of course you may, man, any mortal time you feel inclined, or can.
By the way, how do you like your new chief?"

"No end. He's--er--he's such a gentleman."

There was a world of admiration--of hero worship in the young man's
tone, and colonial youth is by no means prone to such.

"Ah," replied Thornhill. "Well, I agree with you, Prior. Good-bye."

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE ETHIOPIAN EMISSARY.

The kraals of the chief, Babatyana, lay sleeping. So brilliant was this
starlight, however, that the yellow domes of the thatch huts could be
distinguished from the ridge--even counted. The latter operation would
have resulted in the discovery that the collection of kraals, dotted
along the wide, bushy valley, numbered among them some three hundred
huts; but these, of course, represented only a section of the tribe over
which Babatyana was chief.

It is a strange sight that of a large, sleeping kraal--or a number of
them, in the wizard hush and calm beauty of an African night. It is so
in harmony with setting and surrounding; the starlight showing up the
ghostly loom of mountain, or suggesting the weird mystery of dark
wilderness lying beneath, where deadly things creep and lurk. And then,
these human habitations, themselves constructed of the grass which
springs up around them, of the very thorns which impede the progress of
their denizens, they stand, in primitive symmetry--not rude, because
that which is circular is nothing if not symmetrical--lying there in
their pathetic insignificance under the vast height of Heaven's vault.
And the said denizens sleeping there! Hopes and fears, virtues and
vices; capacity for intrigue, cupidity; redeeming traits, human
weaknesses--all the same, whether sleeping within the kraal of the
savage to the lullaby of the voices of prowling creatures of the night,
or in stately mansion amid the roar and rattle of the metropolis of the
world. All the same--all, all!

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The air is fresh and sweet with the fragrance of flowering shrubs, is
faintly melodious with the ghostly whistle of circling plover invisible
overhead. The cry of a jackal rings out from the hillside, receding
further and further, to be answered again from another point in the
misty gloom--then the bark of a restless dog in some slumbering kraal
beneath. Or the hoot of a night bird hawking above the silent expanse,
and the d