“Hardly was the thought out of my head when I caught sight in the moonlight of the lioness bounding along through the long grass, and after her a couple of cubs about the size of mastiffs.  She stopped within a few feet of my head, and stood, waved her tail, and fixed me with her glowing yellow eyes; but just as I thought that it was all over she turned and began to feed on Kaptein, and so did the cubs.  There were four of them within eight feet of me, growling and quarrelling, rending and tearing, and crunching poor Kaptein’s bones; and there I lay shaking with terror, and the cold perspiration pouring out of me, feeling like another Daniel come to judgment in a new sense of the phrase.  Presently the cubs had eaten their fill, and began to get restless.  One went round to the back of the waggon and pulled 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 tasted 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 reflected that after all life was a very enjoyable thing.

“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 bounded off without a sound—­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 brutes, 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 business, and having armed myself with an ordinary double No. 12 smoothbore, the first breechloader I ever had, I started.  I took the smoothbore because it shot a bullet very well; and my experience has been that a round ball from a smoothbore 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.