could quote the Scottish poet Burns and the Ingoldsby Legends, then recently published, literally by the page.  It was from that I contracted a fondness for the latter amusing writings, which has never left me.  Burns I never cared for so much, probably because of the Scottish dialect which repelled me.  What little education I got was from my father, but I never had much leaning towards books, nor he much time to teach them to me.  On the other hand, I was always a keen observer of the ways of men and nature.  By the time that I was twenty I could speak Dutch and three or four Kaffir dialects perfectly, and I doubt if there was anybody in South Africa who understood native ways of thought and action more completely than I did.  Also I was really a very good shot and horseman, and I think—­as, indeed, my subsequent career proves to have been the case—­a great deal tougher than the majority of men.  Though I was then, as now, light and small, nothing seemed to tire me.  I could bear any amount of exposure and privation, and I never met the native who was my master in feats of endurance.  Of course, all that is different now, I am speaking of my early manhood.

It may be wondered that I did not run absolutely wild in such surroundings, but I was held back from this by my father’s society.  He was one of the gentlest and most refined men that I ever met; even the most savage Kaffir loved him, and his influence was a very good one for me.  He used to call himself one of the world’s failures.  Would that there were more such failures.  Every morning when his work was done he would take his prayer-book and, sitting on the little stoep or verandah of our station, would read the evening psalms to himself.  Sometimes there was not light enough for this, but it made no difference, he knew them all by heart.  When he had finished he would look out across the cultivated lands where the mission Kaffirs had their huts.

But I knew it was not these he saw, but rather the grey English church, and the graves ranged side by side before the yew near the wicket gate.

It was there on the stoep that he died.  He had not been well, and one evening I was talking to him, and his mind went back to Oxfordshire and my mother.  He spoke of her a good deal, saying that she had never been out of his mind for a single day during all these years, and that he rejoiced to think he was drawing near that land wither she had gone.  Then he asked me if I remembered the night when Squire Carson came into the study at the vicarage, and told him that his wife had run away, and that he was going to change his name and bury himself in some remote land.

I answered that I remembered it perfectly.

“I wonder where he went to,” said my father, “and if he and his daughter Stella are still alive.  Well, well!  I shall never meet them again.  But life is a strange thing, Allan, and you may.  If you ever do, give them my kind love.”