“How do you mean?”

“Why! that the said idiotically-handled craft collided with ours, two days out, cutting her down to the water’s edge and sinking her in thirteen minutes. I and twenty-four others were picked up, but the rest went to Davy Jones’s locker. There weren’t many more of them, though, for it was a small boat, and I was nearly the only passenger.”

“Oh! And you didn’t try the voyage again?” said Mrs Brathwaite, in subdued tones. She was colonial born, and in her own element as brave a woman as ever stepped. In the earlier frontier wars she had stood by her husband’s side within the laager and loaded his guns for him, while the conflict waxed long and desperate, and the night was ablaze with the flash of volleys, and the air was heavy with asphyxiating smoke, and the detonating crash of musketry and the battle-shouts of the savage foe, and had never flinched. But she had a shuddering horror of the sea, and would almost have gone through all her terrible experiences again rather than trust herself for one hour on its smiling, treacherous expanse.

“Well, no; I didn’t,” he answered. “I took it as an omen, and concluded to dismiss the Far West in favour of the ‘Sunny South.’ So here I am.”

“Ah! well,” put in the old settler. “Perhaps we’ll be able to find you something in the way of excitement here, if that’s what you were in search of, and that before very long, too. All isn’t so quiet here as they try to make out. I’ve lived on the frontier, man and boy, all my life, and I can see pretty plainly that there’s mischief brewing.”

“Is there? I did hear something of the sort on my way up, now I think of it; but I had an idea that the days of war were over, and that Jack Kafir had got his quietus.”

“Ha! ha! Had you really, now? Why, bless my soul, the Kafirs are far more numerous than ever; they outnumber us by fifty to one. They hate us as much as ever they did, and for some time past have been steadily collecting guns and ammunition. Now, what do they want those guns and that ammunition for? Not for hunting, for there’s next to no game in all Kafirland. No, it is to put them on an equal footing with us; and then, with their numbers, they think to have it all their own way. There’s mischief brewing, mark my words.”

“It wouldn’t mean a scrimmage among themselves, would it? They might be anxious to exterminate each other,” ventured Claverton.

The other smiled significantly, and 

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