ting of a Zulu impi.

"You think that sight fine, wife," he said, pointing to the spouting
foam; "but I call it the ugliest in the world. Almighty! it turns my
blood cold to look at it and to think that Christian men, ay, and women
and children too, may be pounding to pulp in those breakers."

"Without doubt the death is as good as another," I answered; "not that I
would choose it, for I wish to die in my bed with the _predicant_ saying
prayers over me, and my husband weeping--or pretending to--at the foot
of it."

"Choose it!" he said. "I had sooner be speared by savages or hanged by
the English Government as my father was."

"What makes you think of death in the sea, Jan?" I asked.

"Nothing, wife, nothing; but there is that fool of a Pondo
witch-doctoress down by the cattle kraal, and I heard her telling a
story as I went by to look at the ox that the snake bit yesterday."

"What was the story?"

"Oh! a short one; she said she had it from the coast Kaffirs--that far
away, up towards the mouth of the Umzimbubu, when the moon was young,
great guns had been heard fired one after the other, minute by minute,
and that then a ship was seen, a tall ship with three masts and many
'eyes' in it--I suppose she meant portholes with the light shining
through them--drifting on to the coast before the wind, for a storm was
raging, while streaks of fire like red and blue lightnings rushed up
from her decks."

"Well, and then?"

"And then, nothing. Almighty! that is all the tale. Those waves which
you love to watch can tell the rest."

"Most like it is some Kaffir lie, husband."

"May be, but amongst these people news travels faster than a good horse,
and before now there have been wrecks upon this coast. Child, put down
that gun. Do you want to shoot your mother? Have I not told you that you
must never touch a gun?" and he pointed to Suzanne, who had picked up
her father's _roer_--for in those days, when we lived among so many
Kaffirs, every man went armed--and was playing at soldiers with it.

"I was shooting buck and Kaffirs, papa," she said, obeying him with a
pout.

"Shooting Kaffirs, were you? Well, there will be a good deal of that to
do before all is finished in this land, little one. But it is not work
for girls; you should have been a boy, Suzanne."

"I can't; I am a girl," she answered; "and I haven't any brothers like
other girls. Why haven't I any brothers?"

Jan shrugged his shoulders, and looked at m