“He must have been very happy,” said Em.

“I do not know,” said Lyndall; “but he had what he said he would have, and that is better than being happy. He was their master, and all the people were white with fear of him. They joined together to fight him. He was one and they were many, and they got him down at last. They were like the wild cats when their teeth are fast in a great dog, like cowardly wild cats,” said the child, “they would not let him go. They were many; he was only one. They sent him to an island in the sea, a lonely island, and kept him there fast. He was one man, and they were many, and they were terrified at him. It was glorious!” said the child.

“And what then?” said Em.

“Then he was alone there in that island with men to watch him always,” said her companion, slowly and quietly, “and in the long lonely nights he used to lie awake and think of the things he had done in the old days, and the things he would do if they let him go again. In the day when he walked near the shore it seemed to him that the sea all around him was a cold chain about his body pressing him to death.”

“And then?” said Em much interested.

“He died there in that island; he never got away.”

“It is rather a nice story,” said Em; “but the end is sad.”

“It is a terrible, hateful ending,” said the little teller of the story, leaning forward on her folded arms; “and the worst is, it is true. I have noticed,” added the child very deliberately, “that it is only the made-up stories that end nicely; the true ones all end so.”

As she spoke the boy’s dark, heavy eyes rested on her face.

“You have read it, have you not?”

He nodded. “Yes; but the brown history tells only what he did, not what he thought.”

“It was in the brown history that I read of him,” said the girl; “but I know what he thought. Books do not tell everything.”

“No,” said the boy, slowly drawing nearer to her and sitting down at her feet. “What you want to know they never tell.”

Then the children fell into silence, till Doss, the dog, growing uneasy at its long continuance, sniffed at one and the other, and his master broke forth suddenly —

“If they could talk, if they could tell us now!” he said, moving his hand out over the surrounding objects — “then we would know something. This ‘kopje,’ if it could tell us how it came here! The Physical Geography says,” he went on most rapidly and confusedly, “that what are dry lands now were once lakes; and what I think is this — these low hills were once the shores of a lake; this ‘kopje’ is some of the stones that were at the bottom, rolled together by the water. But there is this — how did the water come to make one heap here alone, in the centre of the plain?” It was a ponderous question; no one volunteered an answer. “When I was little,” said the boy, “I always looked at it and wondered, and I thought a great giant was buried under it. Now I know the water must have done it; but how? It is very wonderful. Did one little stone come first, and stopped the others as they rolled?” said the boy with earnestness, in a low voice, more as speaking to himself than to them.