in deep excitement. "Now the Boers have shot them all, so that
we never see a little yellow face peeping out among the stones." He
paused, a dreamy look coming over his face. "And the wild bucks have
gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and
only the stones will lie on here, looking at everything like they look
now. I know that it is I who am thinking," the fellow added slowly, "but
it seems as though it were they who are talking. Has it never seemed so
to you, Lyndall?"

"No, it never seems so to me," she answered.

The sun had dipped now below the hills, and the boy, suddenly
remembering the ewes and lambs, started to his feet.

"Let us also go to the house and see who has come," said Em, as the boy
shuffled away to rejoin his flock, while Doss ran at his heels, snapping
at the ends of the torn trousers as they fluttered in the wind.

Chapter 1.III. I Was A Stranger, and Ye Took Me In.

As the two girls rounded the side of the kopje, an unusual scene
presented itself. A large group was gathered at the back door of the
homestead.

On the doorstep stood the Boer-woman, a hand on each hip, her face
red and fiery, her head nodding fiercely. At her feet sat the yellow
Hottentot maid, her satellite, and around stood the black Kaffer maids,
with blankets twisted round their half-naked figures. Two, who stamped
mealies in a wooden block, held the great stampers in their hands, and
stared stupidly at the object of attraction. It certainly was not to
look at the old German overseer, who stood in the centre of the group,
that they had all gathered together. His salt-and-pepper suit, grizzly
black beard, and grey eyes were as familiar to every one on the farm
as the red gables of the homestead itself; but beside him stood the
stranger, and on him all eyes were fixed. Ever and anon the newcomer
cast a glance over his pendulous red nose to the spot where the
Boer-woman stood, and smiled faintly.

"I'm not a child," cried the Boer-woman, in low Cape Dutch, "and I
wasn't born yesterday. No, by the Lord, no! You can't take me in! My
mother didn't wean me on Monday. One wink of my eye and I see the whole
thing. I'll have no tramps sleeping on my farm," cried Tant Sannie
blowing. "No, by the devil, no! not though he had sixty-times-six red
noses."

There the German overseer mildly interposed that the man was not a
tramp, but a highly respectable individual, whose horse had died by an
accident t