that is upon it for your own; but I,” said Lyndall, “will have nothing. I must learn.”
“Oh, Lyndall! I will give you some of my sheep,” said Em, with a sudden burst of pitying generosity.
“I do not want your sheep,” said the girl slowly; “I want things of my own. When I am grown up,” she added, the flush on her delicate features deepening at every word, “there will be nothing that I do not know. I shall be rich, very rich; and I shall wear not only for best, but every day, a pure white silk, and little rose-buds, like the lady in Tant Sannie’s bedroom, and my petticoats will be embroidered, not only at the bottom, but all through.”
The lady in Tant Sannie’s bedroom was a gorgeous creature from a fashion-sheet, which the Boer-woman, somewhere obtaining, had pasted up at the foot of her bed, to be profoundly admired by the children.
“It would be very nice,” said Em; but it seemed a dream of quite too transcendent a glory ever to be realized.
At this instant there appeared at the foot of the kopje two figures—the one, a dog, white and sleek, one yellow ear hanging down over his left eye; the other, his master, a lad of fourteen, and no other than the boy Waldo, grown into a heavy, slouching youth of fourteen. The dog mounted the kopje quickly, his master followed slowly. He wore an aged jacket much too large for him, and rolled up at the wrists, and, as of old, a pair of dilapidated velschoens and a felt hat. He stood before the two girls at last.
“What have you been doing today?” asked Lyndall, lifting her eyes to his face.
“Looking after ewes and lambs below the dam. Here!” he said, holding out his hand awkwardly, “I brought them for you.”
There were a few green blades of tender grass.
“Where did you find them?”
“On the dam wall.”
She fastened them beside the leaf on her blue pinafore.
“They look nice there,” said the boy, awkwardly rubbing his great hands and watching her.
“Yes; but the pinafore spoils it all; it is not pretty.”
He looked at it closely.
“Yes, the squares are ugly; but it looks nice upon you—beautiful.”
He now stood silent before them, his great hands hanging loosely at either side.
“Some one has come today,” he mumbled out suddenly, when the idea struck him.
“Who?” asked both girls.
“An Englishman on foot.”
“What does he look like?” asked Em.
“I did not notice; but he has a very large nose,” said the boy slowly. “He asked the way to the house.”
“Didn’t he tell you his name?”
“Yes—Bonaparte Blenkins.”
“Bonaparte!” said Em, “why that is like the reel Hottentot Hans plays on the violin—
‘Bonaparte, Bonaparte, my wife is sick;
In the middle of the week, but Sundays not,
I give her rice and beans for soup’—
It is a funny name.”
“There was a living man called Bonaparte once,” said she of the great eyes.
“Ah yes, I know,” said Em—“the poor prophet whom the lions ate. I am always so sorry for him.”
Her companion cast a quiet glance upon her.
“He was the greatest man who ever lived,” she said, “the man I like best.”
“And what did he do?” asked Em, conscious that she had made a mistake, and that her prophet was not the man.
“He was one man, only one,” said her little companion slowly, “yet all the people in the world feared him. He was not born great, he was common as we are; yet he was master of the world at last. Once he was only a little child, then he was a lieutenant, then he was a general, then he was an emperor. When he said a thing to himself he never forgot it. He waited, and waited and waited, and it came at last.”
“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. There were many; he was only one. They sent him to an island on 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 were 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
