difference whether he had matches or not.”

“What, in winter time, and with lions about?”

“Yah! Well, you get used to that. It was a bit frosty, and sometimes wet, and at first the lions worried him a lot and treed him several nights; but he says that that was nothing, while the sense of being lost—dead, yet alive—remained. What’s that? Live? Oh, he doesn’t know himself how he lived, but we could pretty well tell by his condition when we found him. We were out shooting about five miles down-stream, and on one of the sandy spits of the river we saw fresh footprints. Nigger, we thought, as it was barefoot. We wondered, because there were no kraals near here, and we had seen no cattle spoor or footpaths. I was on top of the bank every minute expecting a duiker or Bush buck to make a break out, and—I tell you—I don’t know when I got such a start—such a turn, I should say—as when I caught sight of a white face looking at me out of an ant-bear hole. Great Caesar! there was something so infernally uncanny, wild, and hunted in the look that I instinctively got the gun round to cover him if he came at me. When the others came up, he crawled out, stark naked, sunburnt, scratched, shock-headed—still staring with that strange hunted look—came up to us and—laughed! We led him back to our camp. He could tell nothing, could hardly understand any of our questions. He was quite dazed. His hands were cut and disfigured, the nails were worn off with burrowing for roots. We went to his den. It was a big ant-bear hole under an old tree and among rocks—a well-chosen spot. He had burrowed it out a bit, I think, and in a sort of pigeon-hole or socket in the side of it there were a few nuts, and round about there were the remains of nuts and chewed roots, stones of fruit, and such things. I never could understand how it was that, being mad as he certainly was then, he had still the sense—well, really it was an instinct more than any knowledge—to get roots and wild-fruits to keep body and soul together!”

“A suggestive subject, truly,” said a man who had more millions to his credit than you would expect of a traveller in Mashonaland. “A man starving within rifle-shot of his friends and supplies. Helpless in spite of the resources that civilisation gives him, and saved from absolute death by a blessed instinct that we didn’t know was ours since the days of the anthropomorphic ape! H’m! You’re right, Barberton! He couldn’t have thought much of the beauties of the night, and, if he thought at all, he must have placed a grim and literal interpretation on the Descent of Man when he was grubbing for roots with bleeding, nail-stripped fingers or climbing for nuts without a tail to steady him!”

Among us there was a retired naval man, a clean-featured, bronzed, shrewd-looking fellow, who was a determined listener during these camp-fire chats; in fact, he seldom made a remark at all. He sat cross-legged, with one eye closed—a telescope habit, I suppose—watching Barberton for quite a spell, and at last said, very slowly, and seemingly speaking under compulsion:

“Well, you never know how they take these shocks. We picked a man up once whose two companions had lain dead beside him for days and days. Before he became delirious, the last thing he remembers was getting some carbolic acid from a small medicine-chest. His mates had been dead two days then, and he had not the strength to heave them overboard. I believe he wanted to drink the carbolic. Any way, he spilt it, and went off his head with the smell of carbolic around him. He recovered while with us—we were on a weary deep-sea-sounding cruise—but twice during the voyage he had short but violent returns of the delirium and the other conditions that he was suffering under when we found him. By the merest accident our doctor discovered that it was the smell of carbolic that sent him off. Once—years after this—he nearly died of it. He had had fever, and they kept disinfecting his room; but, luckily for him, he became dangerous and violent, and they had to remove him to another place. He was all right in a few days.”

“Do you believe that a man could live out a reasonably long lifetime in the way that ‘forty days’ chap lived? I suppose he could, eh! Shoo! Fancy forgetting the civilised uses of tongue and limbs and brain! It seems awful, doesn’t it? and yet men have been known to deliberately choose a life of savagery and barbarism—men whose lines had been cast in easy places, too!”

“That’s all very well,” said Barberton. “Now you are speaking of fellows settling down among savages and in the wilds voluntarily, and with certain provisions made for emergencies, etc, not of men lost.”

“Even so, a man must deteriorate most horribly under such circumstances.”

“Well,” said Barberton contemplatively, “I don’t know so much about that. It all depends upon the man. Mind you, I do think that the end is always fiasco—tragedy, trouble, ruin, call it what you like. We can’t throw back to barbarism at will. For good or ill we have taken civilisation, and the man who quits it pays heavy toll on the road he travels, and, likely enough, fetches up where he never expected to.”

The man who wrote for the papers smiled.

“I know,” he said with kindling eye—“I know. It was just such a case you told us of at Churchill’s Camp the other night. A man of the best calibre and training goes wild and marries two—mark you, two!—Kaffir women, and becomes a Swazie chief, and then the drama of the—”

“Drama be damned!” growled Barberton. “It was one case out of twenty of the same sort.”

Barberton was nervously apprehensive of ridicule, and hated to be traded and walked out for effects.

“I was up on the Transvaal-Swazie border in ’86,” said the millionaire. “I remember you told me something of them then. It was a warm corner, Swazieland, then—about the warmest in South Africa, I should think. Eh?”

“You’re right. It was. But,” said Barberton, turning to the correspondent, “you were talking of men going amok through playing white nigger. Well, I can tell you this, that two of my best friends have done that same trick, and I’d stake my head that better men or more thorough gentlemen never trod in shoe-leather, for all their Kaffir ways.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked the millionaire, “that you have known men settle down among natives, living among them as one of themselves, and still retain the manners, customs, instincts, habits of mind and body, even to the ambitions, of a white man?”

“No—well, I can’t quite say that. Their ambitions, as far as you could gauge them, were a Kaffir’s; that is, they aspired to own cattle, and to hunt successfully, but—And yet I don’t know that it is right to say that even, because in almost every case these men get the ‘hanker’ for white life again sooner or later. The Kaffir ambition may be a temporary one, or it may be that the return to white ways is the passing mania. Who knows, any way? From my own experience of them, I can say that the return to their own colour almost invariably means their doom and ruin. I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed it, and it seems like—like a sort of judgment, if you believe in those things.”

“And you know,” he said, after taking a few pulls at the pipe again, “there’s a sense of justice in that, too. Civilisation, scorned and flouted, being the instrument of its own revenge! If one could vest the abstract with personal feelings, what an ample revenge would be hers at the sight of the renegade—sick-hearted,