French. And now, Allan, we have talked enough, and you had better go to
sleep. You must not excite yourself, you know, or it may set up new
inflammation in the wound."

"Go to sleep. Must not excite yourself." I kept muttering those words
for hours, serving them up in my mind with a spice of bitter thought.
At last torpor, or weakness, overcame me, and I fell into a kind of net
of bad dreams which, thank Heaven! I have now forgotten. Yet when
certain events happened subsequently I always thought, and indeed still
think, that these or something like them, had been a part of those evil
dreams.

On the morning following this conversation I was at length allowed to be
carried to the stoep, where they laid me down, wrapped in a very dirty
blanket, upon a rimpi-strung bench or primitive sofa. When I had
satisfied my first delight at seeing the sun and breathing the fresh
air, I began to study my surroundings. In front of the house, or what
remained of it, so arranged that the last of them at either end we made
fast to the extremities of the stoep, was arranged an arc of wagons,
placed as they are in a laager and protected underneath by earth thrown
up in a mound and by boughs of the mimosa thorn. Evidently these
wagons, in which the guard of Boers and armed natives who still remained
on the place slept at night, were set thus as a defence against a
possible attack by the Quabies or other Kaffirs.

During the daytime, however, the centre wagon was drawn a little on one
side to leave a kind of gate. Through this opening I saw that a long
wall, also semicircular, had been built outside of them, enclosing a
space large enough to contain at night all the cattle and horses that
were left to the Heer Marais, together with those of his friends, who