d went over. He saw them passing
on before him, and there was nothing that could stop them. He thought of
how that stream had rolled on through all the long ages of the past--how
the old Greeks and Romans had gone over; the countless millions of China
and India, they were going over now. Since he had come to bed, how many
had gone!

And the watch said, "Eternity, eternity, eternity!"

"Stop them! stop them!" cried the child.

And all the while the watch kept ticking on; just like God's will, that
never changes or alters, you may do what you please.

Great beads of perspiration stood on the boy's forehead. He climbed out
of bed and lay with his face turned to the mud floor.

"Oh, God, God! save them!" he cried in agony. "Only some, only a few!
Only for each moment I am praying here one!" He folded his little hands
upon his head. "God! God! save them!"

He grovelled on the floor.

Oh, the long, long ages of the past, in which they had gone over! Oh,
the long, long future, in which they would pass away! Oh, God! the long,
long, long eternity, which has no end!

The child wept, and crept closer to the ground.

*****

The Sacrifice.

The farm by daylight was not as the farm by moonlight. The plain was a
weary flat of loose red sand, sparsely covered by dry karoo bushes,
that cracked beneath the tread like tinder, and showed the red earth
everywhere. Here and there a milk-bush lifted its pale-coloured rods,
and in every direction the ants and beetles ran about in the
blazing sand. The red walls of the farmhouse, the zinc roofs of the
outbuildings, the stone walls of the kraals, all reflected the fierce
sunlight, till the eye ached and blenched. No tree or shrub was to
be seen far or near. The two sunflowers that stood before the door,
out-stared by the sun, drooped their brazen faces to the sand; and the
little cicada-like insects cried aloud among the stones of the kopje.

The Boer-woman, seen by daylight, was even less lovely than when, in
bed, she rolled and dreamed. She sat on a chair in the great front room,
with her feet on a wooden stove, and wiped her flat face with the corner
of her apron, and drank coffee, and in Cape Dutch swore that the
beloved weather was damned. Less lovely, too, by daylight was the dead
Englishman's child, her little stepdaughter, upon whose freckles and
low, wrinkled forehead the sunlight had no mercy.

"Lyndall," the child said to her little orphan cousin, who sat with her