Ucatella went to Phoebe, and said, “Missy, my child is good and brave.”

“Bother you and your child!” said poor Phoebe.  “To think of his flying at a giant like that, and you letting of him.  I’m all of a tremble from head to foot:”  and Phoebe relieved herself with a cry.

“Oh, missy!” said Ucatella.

“There, never mind me.  Do go and look after your child, and keep him out of more mischief.  I wish we were safe at Dale’s Kloof, I do.”

Ucatella complied, and went botanizing with Dr. Staines; but that gentleman, in the course of his scientific researches into camomile flowers and blasted heath, which were all that lovely region afforded, suddenly succumbed and stretched out his limbs, and said, sleepily, “Good-night—­U—­cat—­” and was off into the land of Nod.

The wagon, which, by the way, had passed the larger but slower vehicle, found him fast asleep, and Ucatella standing by him as ordered, motionless and grand.

“Oh, dear! what now?” said Phoebe:  but being a sensible woman, though in the hen and chickens line, she said, “’Tis the fighting and the excitement.  ’Twill do him more good than harm, I think:”  and she had him bestowed in the wagon, and never disturbed him night nor day.  He slept thirty-six hours at a stretch; and when he awoke, she noticed a slight change in his eye.  He looked at her with an interest he had not shown before, and said, “Madam, I know you.”

“Thank God for that,” said Phoebe.

“You kept a little shop, in the other world.”

Phoebe opened her eyes with some little alarm.

“You understand—­the world that is locked up—­for the present.”

“Well, sir, so I did; and sold you milk and butter.  Don’t you mind?”

“No—­the milk and butter—­they are locked up.”

The country became wilder, the signs of life miserably sparse; about every twenty miles the farmhouse or hut of a degenerate Boer, whose children and slaves pigged together, and all ran jostling, and the mistress screamed in her shrill Dutch, and the Hottentots all chirped together, and confusion reigned for want of method:  often they went miles, and saw nothing but a hut or two, with a nude Hottentot eating flesh, burnt a little, but not cooked, at the door; and the kloofs became deeper and more turbid, and Phoebe was in an agony about her salt, and Christopher advised her to break it in big lumps, and hang it all about the wagon in sacks; and she did, and Ucatella said profoundly, “My child is wise;” and they began to draw near home, and Phoebe to fidget; and she said to Christopher, “Oh, dear!  I hope they are all alive and well:  once you leave home, you don’t know what may have happened by then you come back.  One comfort, I’ve got Sophy:  she is very dependable, and no beauty, thank my stars.”

That night, the last they had to travel, was cloudy, for a wonder, and they groped with lanterns.

Ucatella and her child brought up the rear.  Presently there was a light pattering behind them.  The swift-eared Ucatella clutched Christopher’s arm, and turning round, pointed back, with eyeballs white and rolling.  There were full a dozen animals following them, whose bodies seemed colorless as shadows, but their eyes little balls of flaming lime-light.