at the Impala buck that hung there, and the other came round my way and commenced the sniffing game at my leg.  Indeed, he did more than that, for, my trouser being hitched up a little, he began to lick the bare skin with his rough tongue.  The more he licked the more he liked it, to judge from his increased vigour and the loud purring noise he made.  Then I knew that the end had come, for in another second his file-like tongue would have rasped through the skin of my leg—­which was luckily pretty tough—­and have drawn the blood, and then there would be no chance for me.  So I just lay there and thought of my sins, and prayed to the Almighty, and thought that, after all, life was a very enjoyable thing.

“And then all of a sudden I heard a crashing of bushes and the shouting and whistling of men, and there were the two boys coming back with the cattle, which they had found trekking along all together.  The lions lifted their heads and listened, then without a sound bounded off—­and I fainted.

“The lions came back no more that night, and by the next morning my nerves had got pretty straight again; but I was full of wrath when I thought of all that I had gone through at the hands, or rather noses, of those four lions, and of the fate of my after-ox Kaptein.  He was a splendid ox, and I was very fond of him.  So wroth was I that, like a fool, I determined to attack the whole family of them.  It was worthy of a greenhorn out on his first hunting-trip; but I did it nevertheless.  Accordingly after breakfast, having rubbed some oil upon my leg, which was very sore from the cub’s tongue, I took the driver, Tom, who did not half like the job, and having armed myself with an ordinary double No. 12 smooth-bore, the first breech-loader I ever had, I started.  I took the smooth-bore because it shot a bullet very well; and my experience has been that a round ball from a smooth-bore is quite as effective against a lion as an express bullet.  The lion is soft, and not a difficult animal to finish if you hit him anywhere in the body.  A buck takes far more killing.

“Well, I started, and the first thing I set to work to do was to try to make out whereabouts the brutes lay up for the day.  About three hundred yards from the waggon was the crest of a rise covered with single mimosa-trees, dotted about in a park-like fashion, and beyond this was a stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan, or water-hole, which covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed with reeds, now in the sear and yellow leaf.  From the farther edge of this pan the ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had been cut out by the action of the water, and was pretty thickly sprinkled with bush, among which grew some large trees, I forget of what sort.