lit waters of their bay. Miss Etherington accordingly spoke again.

"I wish," she murmured-"I wish there were a lot of people to tell."

"To tell what? That we are"-he coughed nervously— "engaged?"

"Yes. Engaged sounds queer on a desert island, doesn't it? But when a girl gets engaged she wants to tell everybody."

"That's strange. When I get engaged I feel that the secret is too precious to pass on to anybody. It's mine! mine! ours! ours! 'Ours' how wonderful that sounds, after years of just 'mine.' But" he brought his gaze back seaward again-"do you really

They were taken home next day on board the Morning Star, brought out to search for them by their host and the other survivors of the wreck.

For many years Mr Leslie Gale never ceased to bless the three-masted schooner whose passing had been the means of bringing them together. In fact, he exalted that nameless vessel into a fetish, ascribing to it match - making properties bordering upon the supernatural. It was Mrs Gale who pricked the bubble.

"I wonder, old lady," observed her husband one day, "if you would ever have found out that you really cared for me if you hadn't seen that old hooker go sailing by-what?"

VOL. CXCII.-NO. MCLXI.

"I wonder," said Mrs Gale patiently.

"It was lucky," continued the fatuous Leslie, "that no ship turned up earlier on, before you had acquired a taste for me, so to speak. That would have put me in the cart, wouldn't it?"

"Would it?"

"Yes. Supposing that it had happened sooner? Supposing, for instance, that after we had been together for a matter of three weeks, instead of three months, you had climbed Point Garry one fine day and seen a ship go sailing by? What then?'

Mrs Leslie Gale arose, and began to put away her work. "I did," she said briefly. "Twice."

C

THE breakfast-table is laid in the verandah of the old blockhouse overlooking the Sabi river. The midsummer sun, already high in the heavens, indicates that the hour is close on 11 A.M. From the verandah, with its iron-fronted breast work, loopholed for rifles, and now crowned thickly with geraniums, the eye can roam over an immense panorama of treetops, monotonous save in their varying tints of green, to where, purple from distance, the faraway ridges cut the sky-line to north and east and west. Peeping up behind these ridges may be discerned on clear days the bold escarpment of the Drakensberg Mountains, dim blue and mysterious at sixty miles; while balancing them, as it were, on the eastern horizon, rises hazily the lesser outline of the Lebombo Hills, the frontier mark of the Transvaal and Portuguese East Africa.

We glance casually over the landscape before sitting down. Away to the north there, beyond the river, two or three dark specks are gliding through the deep blue of the sky, and are evidently moving with intention towards some definite spot. Vultures without any doubt, and on the track of meat. Smoothly sinking earthwards, they disappear among the trees a mile or so

down river, and as they do so another and yet another bird appears, dropping, as it seems, directly out of the sky, to vanish from sight at the same spot. With a heavy flapping of wings a great griffon now passes down river on a level with, and not fifty yards from, the blockhouse. Resting perhaps in the topmost branches of some old dead forest giant, he must from his perch have caught sight of the movements of his relatives, and is making haste to join them. Ali, the faithful, who, white-robed and silent-footed, at this moment enters with the items of our not very pretentious menu, has his attention drawn to the matter, and remarks, with just the faintest suggestion of interest, that not only has he noticed the movements of the birds, but has already taken action thereon. Ali takes immense pride in his mastery of what he believes to be the English language, and "I go my down, please," conveys to his master, habituated by years of conversational intercourse, more than it perhaps might to a member of the general public. What we understand is that he has already dispatched someone to ascertain the wherefore of the gathering. It is one of our most rigid principles in the Game Reserve that the underlying reason for any such

assembly of the feathered tribe must at once be investigated; that if some slayer of the innocent has been accessory thereto, as usually is the case, he may receive, if possible, swift justice.

Breakfast has been over some time, when of a sudden steps are heard, followed by voices in conversation. Among some scraps of the latter which reach us seems to occur the word "madantshe." Then comes a knook at the door, and, before he has spoken a word, the expression on Jafuta's face suffices to confirm the impression gathered by our ears. Yes, it is wild dogs: they have killed an impala, and there there are apparently quite a lot of them in the pack.

In some ten minutes we are equipped and ready. Outside wait Jase and Steamela, the former hatless, in a khaki jacket innocent of all buttons, and a loin-cloth of uncertain colour and age; the latter crowned with a very ancient and almost brimless straw hat, a painfully insufficient shirt, and the few remains of a pair of cast service trousers completing his attire. Each firmly grasps several formidable looking assagais, and a knobkerrie that is, a hard wood stick having an enormous round head of one piece with it. They carry their sandals in their hands, ready to put on should very rocky or thornstrewn ground have to be negotiated. Good trackers both, as trackers go nowadays, but I think they would prefer to go into the bush clad in

the full glory of their best police uniforms, handcuffs and all; they feel certain that the latter especially would in some obscure way affect, perhaps hypnotise, the wrongdoers, and so ensure success. We, on the other hand, have a not unnatural partiality for our trackers being as nearly as possible in the garb of Adam, and so we have struck a compromise in these shreds and patches of European garb, which, together with our own, are likely to be largely claimed as the prey of the wait-a-bit thorns before the end of the day. Water-bottles, field-glasses, and other paraphernalia of the chase are hung round our followers, and there then remain a few necessary instructions for Ali in regard to having some meal ready for us whenever we happen to return, ere we wend our way down to the drift where the ancient flat-bottomed punt awaits us.

Three minutes' energetic poling and one haul over a midstream bank brings us to the other side of the Sabi, where, having dragged up the boat high and dry against eventualities, we plunge through the belt of long and sharp pointed reeds which girdles this, like most other African streams. Turning along the firm bank, we make our way by the edge of the bush to the point down-stream where some vultures may still be seen hovering and descending. The sky is clear except for a few white olouds banked low down in the south, and an occasional fleecy tag, which,

driven before the northerly breeze, floats away as if to join them. It has been very hot for the past week, and though the north wind does not blow with the deadly persistence and furnace breath of the last three days, to face it is still rather like standing in front of a red-hot oven, and the air seems full of fine impalpable dust, and of a heat which can be seen. Not perhaps an ideal day for tracking work, but the opportunity must be taken when it offers. At our approach many of the vultures rise in a cluster from the ground and flap heavily away to adjacent trees, whence they may watch the proceedings of the intruders. These are the first comers, of course. Later arrivals are still dropping in from all directions, their swelling numbers far in excess of the amount of food provided for them. It is not a difficult matter to find the "kill." Right in the middle of a little open space in the bush, the grass all around trampled, bloodstained, and strewn with the feathers of contending vultures, lies a small heap of nearly clean-picked bones and some tattered fragments of soiled skin: remains of what an hour or two ago was a proud and graceful impala ram. A few yards away, the detached head, some shreds of flesh still adhering to it, bears intact the handsome lyrate horns, contemptuously discarded alike by beast and bird. Possibly the vultures on the trees around, gazing with steady solemn eyes, may

to

share with our native followers a passing emotion of contempt for the white man capable of wasting even a moment in the examination of anything so utterly unpractical. The African has, however, for his part, long given up speculating upon the motives which urge the European along the paths of profitless eccentricity. The interest in trophies is on a par with the tending of garden flowers, which bloom for a few days and then wither, and are never of the slightest use for culinary purposes: there may be, perhaps, some secret enchantment connected with both matters, or it may be only madness, and anyhow it is no concern of his. Nevertheless the inborn politeness of our followers prompts them smile and beam sympathetically, while they expatiate on the size of the trophy and the iniquity of the robbers who have dared to slay so fine an animal-in the Game Reserve, too! In their hearts they are merely lamenting that the vultures have not left a little more meat on the bones. Indeed, between beast and bird it is surprising that anything at all was left, but doubtless the majority of the hunting dogs had already fed pretty substantially this morning. his first visit to the "kill" the careful Jase collected most of the still remaining pickings, and brought them back with him to help to eke out the evening meal. He now selects yet a few more bones, and, removing them a little distance, covers them over securely with

On