“Good-bye, Macumazahn,” he said, nodding his white lock at me.  “Good-bye for a while.  I am not a Christian; your father could not make me that.  But he was a wise man, and when he said that those who loved each other shall meet again, he did not lie.  And I too am a wise man in my way, Macumazahn, and I say it is true that we shall meet again.  All my prophecies to you have come true, Macumazahn, and this one shall come true also.  I tell you that you shall return to Babyan Kraals and shall not find me.  I tell you that you shall journey to a further land than Babyan Kraals and shall find me.  Farewell!” and he took a pinch of snuff, turned, and went.

Of my journey down to Natal there is little to tell.  I met with many adventures, but they were of an every-day kind, and in the end arrived safely at Port Durban, which I now visited for the first time.  Both Tota and my baby boy bore the journey well.  And here I may as well chronicle the destiny of Tota.  For a year she remained under my charge.  Then she was adopted by a lady, the wife of an English colonel, who was stationed at the Cape.  She was taken by her adopted parents to England, where she grew up a very charming and pretty girl, and ultimately married a clergyman in Norfolk.  But I never saw her again, though we often wrote to each other.

Before I returned to the country of my birth, she too had been gathered to the land of shadows, leaving three children behind her.  Ah me! all this took place so long ago, when I was young who now am old.

Perhaps it may interest the reader to know the fate of Mr. Carson’s property, which should of course have gone to his grandson Harry.  I wrote to England to claim the estate on his behalf, but the lawyer to whom the matter was submitted said that my marriage to Stella, not having been celebrated by an ordained priest, was not legal according to English law, and therefore Harry could not inherit.  Foolishly enough I acquiesced in this, and the property passed to a cousin of my father-in-law’s; but since I have come to live in England I have been informed that this opinion is open to great suspicion, and that there is every probability that the courts would have declared the marriage perfectly binding as having been solemnly entered into in accordance with the custom of the place where it was contracted.  But I am now so rich that it is not worth while to move in the matter.  The cousin is dead, his son is in possession, so let him keep it.

Once, and once only, did I revisit Babyan Kraals.  Some fifteen years after my darling’s death, when I was a man in middle life, I undertook an expedition to the Zambesi, and one night outspanned at the mouth of the well-known valley beneath the shadow of the great peak.  I mounted my horse, and, quite alone, rode up the valley, noticing with a strange prescience of evil that the road was overgrown, and, save for the music of the waterfalls, the place silent as death.