size of
her family. She was actually and truly one of _eighty_ brothers and
sisters, her father being a rich man with twenty-five wives. That
simply means that he had twenty-five devoted slaves, who worked
morning, noon and night for him in field and mealy-patch without
wages. Jack the Zulu wanted to be nurse-boy dreadfully, and used to
follow Nurse about with a towel rolled up into a bundle, and another
towel arranged as drapery, dandling an imaginary baby on his arm,
saying plaintively, "Piccaninny, piccaninny!" This Nurse translated
to mean that he was an experienced nurse-boy, and had taken care of a
baby in his own country, but as I had no confidence in maladroit Jack,
who chanced to be very deaf besides, he was ruthlessly relegated to
his pots and pans.

It is very curious to see the cast-off clothes of all the armies of
Europe finding their way hither. The natives of South Africa prefer an
old uniform coat or tunic to any other covering, and the effect of a
short scarlet garment when worn with bare legs is irresistibly droll.
The apparently inexhaustible supply of old-fashioned English coatees
with their worsted epaulettes is just coming to an end, and being
succeeded by ragged red tunics, franc-tireurs' brownish-green jackets
and much-worn Prussian gray coats. Kafir-Land may be looked upon as
the old-clothes shop of all the fighting world, for sooner or later
every cast-off scrap of soldier's clothing drifts toward it. Charlie
prides himself much upon the possession of an old gray great-coat, so
patched and faded that it may well have been one of those which toiled
up the slopes of Inkerman that rainy Sunday morning twenty years ago;
whilst scampish Tom got well chaffed the other day for suddenly making
his appearance clad in a stained red tunic with buff collar and cuffs,
and the number of the old "dirty Half-hundred" in tarnished metal on
the shoulder-scales. "Sir Garnet," cried Charlie the witty,
whilst Jack affected to prostrate himself before the grinning imp,
exclaiming, "O great inkosi!"

Charlie is angry with me just now, and looks most reproachfully my way
on all occasions. The cause is that he was sweeping away sundry huge
spiders' webs from the roof of the verandah (the work of a single
night) when I heard him coughing frightfully. I gave him some
lozenges, saying, "Do your cough good, Charlie." Charlie received them
in both hands held like a cup, the highest form of Kafir gratitude,
and gulped the